Solution-oriented Hypnosis: An Ericksonian Approach 0393701492, 9780393701494

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SOLUTION. ORIENTED HYPNOSIS An Ericksonian Approach

A NORTON PROFESSIONAL BOOK

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SOLUTION: ORIENTED HYPNOSIS An Ericksonian Approach

William Hudson O’Hanlon Michael Martin

DT W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York - London

Theolog y L_ibrary

SCHOOL. OF TH EOLOGY AT CLAREMONT Californie Pao ealP| fo

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Copyright © 1992 by William Hudson O’Hanlon and Michael Martin All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. First Edition The text of this book was composed in Sabon. Composition by Bytheway Typesetting Services, Inc. Manufacturing by Haddon Craftsmen, Inc. Book design by Justine Burkat Trubey

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O’Hanlon, William Hudson.

Solution-oriented hypnosis : an Ericksonian approach / William Hudson O’Hanlon, Michael Martin.

p. cm. “A Norton professional Book.” Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-393-70149-2 1. Hypnotism—Therapeutic use. 2. Erickson, Milton H. I. Martin, Michael, 1951- . II. Title. [DNLM: 1. Hypnosis—methods. WM 415 036s] RC495.034 1992 615.8’512—dc20 DNLM/DLC 92-16410 CIP for Library of Congress

W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 W.W. Norton & Company, Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU Le'2* 3

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To Pat and Patrick, who have entranced me since ve known them. And to R. Lofton Hudson, my father-in-law, who

is an excellent hypnotist despite the fact he probably agrees with very little in this book.—W. H. O. To Betsy and Becca.—M. M.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Preface

xi

1. The Elements of Solution-Oriented Hypnosis Introinduction Traditional vs. Ericksonian Approaches to Induction The Utilization Approach Permission/ Validation/Observation/ Utilization Evocation vs. Suggestion: The Naturalistic Approach Presupposition/Implication/ Contextual Cues Matching Description Permissive and Empowering Words Audiotape Example #1: Milton Erickson—Basic Induction Splitting Linking Interspersal Audiotape Example #2: Jeff Zeig —Conversational Induction The Confusion Technique

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2. Demonstration, Exercises, and Examples of Induction

44

Demonstration #1: Basic Induction

Videotape Example #1: Milton Erickson —Induction with Presupposition Videotape Example #2: Milton Erickson—Induction by Evocation Exercise 41: Induction with Permission and Splitting

Audiotape Example #3: Milton Erickson—Induction with Permission and Splitting Exercise #2: Using Analogies and Anecdotes to Induce Trance

3. Trance Phenomena: Getting Your Hands on the Control Knob of Experience

I

Demonstration #2: Eliciting Trance Phenomena Videotape Example #3: Milton Erickson—Hand/ Arm Levitation (1958) Videotape Example #4: Milton Erickson—Hand/Arm Levitation (1975) Exercise #3: Fishbowl Induction and Levitation

4. Why Use Trance?

108

Exercise #4: Evoking Hand and Arm Levitation

5. The Class of Problems/Class of Solutions Model

130

6. Treating Survivors of Sexual Abuse

142

Videotape Example #5: Bill O’Hanlon— Hypnotherapy for Sexual Abuse Aftereffects Exercise #5: Mutual Hypnosis

7. Treating Pain and Somatic Problems

166

Audiotape Example #4: Joseph Barber —Interspersal for Pain Control Audiotape Example #5: Milton Erickson— Treatment of Tinnitus and Phantom Limb Pain Demonstration #3: Treating Pain and Somatic Problems Exercise #6: Inviting Body Dissociation

8. I’m Only a Hypnotist, So This Is Only a Suggestion

190

Bibliography

195

Index

201

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

HANKS TO SANDY KUTLER,

Gail Hartman, Mary Neuman,

and Pat Hudson for their proofreading and suggestions. (They all learned that I’m very suggestible.) Thanks to Bonnie Ferus for all the typing. Thanks to Margaret Farley at Norton for staying awake while editing the inductions. As always, thanks to Susan Barrows Munro for supporting me in following my bliss (and indulging my choice for the cover art). And thanks to Michael for keeping the project alive and moving. —W. H. O.

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PREFACE

| HIS BOOK WAS RECORDED AT A workshop I presented on Hilton Head, South Carolina in December, 1989. Michael Martin, my best friend, recorded it and transcribed it. He also did the initial editing. I am excited about it because it is the first of my books that I think captures the energy, irreverence, humor, and clarity of my teaching. I like to teach much more than I like to write (although I do love to have written), and I’ve been consistently frustrated that

I haven’t been able yet to write in the lively manner that So, finally, here is a fairly good representation of what workshops captured on the printed page. I say fairly good, you really have to be there to get all the nonverbals, which the show. But this is the next best thing to being there.

I teach. I do in because are half

— Bill O'Hanlon January, 1992

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SOLUTIONORIENTED HYPNOSIS An Ericksonian Approach

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ONE

The Elements of Solution-Oriented Hypnosis

Introinduction I’m Bill O’Hanlon. This is a workshop on solution-oriented hypnosis. We have two days to bring you, if you haven’t had any background in hypnosis at all, from not knowing anything about it, from maybe thinking hypnosis is like voodoo, to competency in doing solution-oriented hypnosis. I have an outrageous promise to make to you. By the end of this workshop, by the end of the two days, if you participate in the exercises, you'll be able to induce a trance. Some of you are probably thinking, “Oh, I don’t know about this stuff. I don’t even know if I believe in hypnosis,” so that’s a bit of a leap for you. But I’ve done the workshop enough times so I can promise that much, even if you’re a complete novice and skeptic. Some of you have already had a fair amount of background in hypnosis, and what I intend this workshop to be for you is a clarification. I used to be a workshop junkie, and I went to a lot of workshops. After a while I got kind of disgusted because I'd go to a workshop and someone would spend three days putting me in trance and looking meaningfully into my eyes while they were talking about my conscious mind and my unconscious mind. I'd spend three days in sort of a semi-trance state, and at the end of the three 1

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SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

days I'd think, “You know, they keep saying my unconscious is going to learn this, my unconscious is going to learn this.” After a while, though, I thought, well, I’'d like my conscious mind to learn this, because I’m one of these people who like to know what I know consciously. So this workshop will probably be different from most of the other Ericksonian workshops you’ve been to, if you've been to any of them. That is, it will be a little more explicit. I’m trying to make things as clear and simple as possible. So you can be empowered to not only know about it, but to do it. Because I’ve taught a lot of workshops and sat through a lot of workshops, I’ve learned a few things about doing them. One of the things I’ve learned is that people seem to learn in different ways. And so I’ve tried to make this workshop as multimodal as possible, as multimedia as possible. I’ll be writing some things on the board, I'll be showing some videotapes, I’ll be playing some audiotapes. You'll have some handouts that will summarize the didactic material. So, if you don’t like to take notes, you don’t have to take notes. You’re welcome to take notes, though, if you want. But the handouts will summarize the main points. And, I’ll have you do some practice exercises. Ill do some live demonstrations. I’ve read enough feedback forms to know that if I leave out one learning modality, people write, “Wish we could have had some live demos,” “Wish we could have had some videotapes,” “Wish we could

have had more practice,” or “Wanted handouts to summarize materials.” So here you'll have all the modalities. By teaching you the elements of solution-oriented hypnosis and having you practice it a little piece at a time, we’re going to walk you up to competency in induction. That will be it for the first day, which will focus on induction. On the second day we will get to the question, which for me is the $64,000 question when I learned hypnosis: “Well, what do I do once they get into trance?” In the Ericksonian tradition, there’s this idea of “trusting the unconscious,” so do I just let them hang Out in trance and trust their unconscious to solve their problem? Or am I actually supposed to do something once they get into trance? Tomorrow will give the answer—my answer —to that question. What to do once they get into trance. And I think it involves

THE ELEMENTS OF SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

3

more than just letting them hang out and letting their creative unconscious do it; more than just reprogramming them with positive beliefs. Tomorrow we'll also talk about when you would ever use hypnosis, because you might have gotten along in your clinical practice just fine so far without ever using hypnosis. And, secondly, what to do once people get into trance. Today’s question is: How do you induce a trance with just about everybody?

Traditional vs. Ericksonian

Approaches to Induction Let me first contrast traditional approaches to hypnosis, which are typically more authoritarian, and Ericksonian or permissive approaches (which aren’t always strictly equal, but close enough for our purposes today). Traditional approaches say there are some people you can induce a trance with and some people you can’t. Some people are hypnotizable and suggestible, some people aren’t. But for clinical purposes, when we want to use trance, we’re going to have to be able to use it with a wide range of people. Even those who are not classically hypnotizable or suggestible. An Ericksonian approach says that you can do trance with just about everybody. Everybody is hypnotizable. You’ve just got to find the ways in which they’re responsive and hypnotizable. In traditional approaches, you know, the stuff you see in movies or on stage, or that you read in books or whatever, it’s the hypnotist with the magnetic personality and eyes who says: “You vill go into trance and you vill obey me.” “Yes, Master” and a zombified appearance is the expected response. And, in traditional approaches, even though it’s not as dramatic as the movies or Svengali, there is still an element of that. The person who is doing the induction is supposed to run the show and to tell the person what it is they will experience and are experiencing. Traditional hypnotists typically use words that are predictive or attributional. They attribute feelings or thoughts or experiences or actions to people. If I say, “Your eyes will close, your eyes are

4

SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

getting heavier and heavier and you'll become very, very relaxed,” or “You are becoming very, very relaxed, you are going deeper

and deeper into a trance, you will go deeper and deeper into a trance.” I’m telling you what will happen or what is happening. And either in your behavior or your experience, I’m supposed to be able to tell you what happens and then have it happen. This works well for those 25% of people who are highly hypnotizable and very suggestible. You say, “Your eyes will close,” and— boom —their eyes close and everything is hunky-dory. There are about 50% of people who are somewhat hypnotizable and somewhat suggestible, and with those people, they will respond depending on the conditions and depending on your skills. And 25% of people aren’t hypnotizable, aren’t suggestible in the traditional hypnosis scheme of things. So these approaches will typically do really well with the first 25%. When you say “Your eyelids are feeling heavier and heavier,” their eyelids will start to feel heavier. When you say, “You'll go deeper into trance,” they’ll start to go deeper into trance. Everything is hunky-dory. The problem is the last 25% who don’t respond to those traditional approaches. Things aren’t so hunky-dory there. If I say to them, “Your eyelids are getting heavier and heavier” and “Your eyes are starting to close,” and their eyes open wider, I’m in deep trouble. Usually what’s concluded is either I’m not a good hypnotist or you're not a good subject. Given the nature of our field we usually conclude that they’re not a good subject and that they’re resistant. That’s the face-saving way for us to handle it.

The Utilization Approach Ericksonian approaches bypass this difficulty in various ways. One of the ways is using permissive words. We don’t try to force people in any sort of direction or take it on ourselves to make them do things or to open up the possibility of failure. We use permissive words like “you could,” “you can,” and “you might.” Instead of saying “Your eyes will close or are closing,” you say, “Your eyes could close” or “You might want to close your eyes, I don’t really know.” So we use more empowering words, permissive words. This approach bypasses that struggle for control that people some-

THE ELEMENTS OF SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

5

times have. Almost everybody doesn’t want to be controlled by someone else, whether they’re clients or just the general public. That’s their fear, that somebody’s going to control them and they fear that hypnosis is one of the ways that someone could control them. The other means of bypassing control and resistance is to give lots of options, lots of possibilities, sort of “multiple choice” options. Let the person decide how it is that they will go into trance. I can say, “You can go into trance with your eyes open or your eyes closed, whatever is more comfortable for you.” “Would you like to go into trance sitting in that chair or would you like to go into trance in another chair?” You give them some choices: “You can go into trance being distracted, listening to everything I say, or you might be drifting off into your own thoughts. You might be very focused on what I’m saying, you might be very focused on what’s here in the room, or you might be drifting away someplace else, some other time.” Those are all possibilities. So we give lots of choices, instead of saying, “This is the way you will do it” or “This is the way you are doing it” or “You have to do it.” A third way to bypass resistance and create cooperation is to validate whatever response that person gives as appropriate and okay, rather than implying that they have to do it the way you think they should do it. Some people won’t come in and do the typical thing of sitting on a chair, putting their hands on their thighs and relaxing. That’s not the way they’re going to go into trance. In fact, they’ll do the exact opposite of that. They’ll be very uptight, they won’t be relaxed at all. Erickson had an approach he called the “Utilization Approach.” The Utilization Approach is just a fancy name for “Use whatever the person brings into therapy.” Whatever they bring to the hypnotic situation, you use. You give them the sense that it’s okay to be doing that, and you help them use that in going into trance. Erickson would use people’s symptoms as trance inductions or therapeutic techniques. He would use their resistance. He’d use their belief systems or delusions. I was working with a woman who believed that God was making her grow younger and was going to have her kill herself and go up to Heaven. You have to somehow use those belief systems or

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SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

you're going to be left behind with that particular person. She believed she was a young child rather than 28 years old. If you come in conflict with those ideas, and you think that they have to have your belief system before they can get psychotherapy, it’s going to be tough going. The Utilization Approach says to use whatever the person brings, in terms of their presenting behavior or whatever it may be. And in hypnosis, use whatever the clients brings to the hypnotic situation as part of the trance induction. I can think of a classic example from Erickson’s work:

A guy comes into Erickson’s office, begins to speak very rapidly while pacing back and forth, and says, “I suppose you'll throw me out of your office like all the other psychiatrists have, like all the other doctors have, because I can’t sit down in a chair, I can’t tell you what my problem is, I can’t free associate, I can’t do any of that stuff, I get very, very uptight before I come to a doctor’s office, but as soon as I get into a

doctor’s office, this is all I can do—I can walk around like

this, I can’t sit on a chair, I can’t tell you what my problem is.” So you might say he’s a little nervous. So Erickson says, “Well, would you mind walking back and forth in my office?” And the man says, “Would I mind? Good God, man, I’ve told you I have to walk back and forth in your office or I can’t stay here. No, I wouldn’t mind.” And Erickson says, “Would you mind, as you're walking back and forth in my office, if I talk to you?” “No, that’s why I’m here,

for you to talk to me, for me to talk to you, but don’t ask me

to sit down, don’t ask me to tell you what my problem is, I can’t tell you what my problem is.” And so on. And every once in a while the man takes a breath, and Erickso n says something in the interim. One of the first things Erickso n

says is, “Walk over to this chair. Now

turn around, now

walk over to this chair. Now turn around, now walk over to this chair. Now walk over to that chair. Now turn around and walk back to that chair. Now turn around and walk to that chair. Now turn around over there and walk to that chair. Now turn back around and walk over to this chair.

THE ELEMENTS OF SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

Now walk to that chair. Now turn around that chair. Now you’ve gotten there, now walk back to that chair. Now you're in the around and walk to that chair. Now turn

and walk back to turn around, now middle. Now turn around and walk

back to the middle, and walk to that chair. Now turn around,

and walk to the middle and walk to that chair. Now turn around and walk away from this chair. Now that you’ve gotten there, now start to turn around, now turn around, now walk over to that chair. Now you’re halfway there, now turn to that chair. Walk to that chair.” Erickson just starts directing his walking. And it’s okay with the guy, just as long as Erickson doesn’t ask him to sit down, doesn’t ask him to tell him what his problems are. Erickson soon starts to change a couple of things. One of the things he starts to change is how quickly he speaks. At first he’s speaking very, very rapidly, like the man’s speaking and like the man’s walking. Erickson then starts to slow down his rate of speaking, just a little. “Now you can walk over to that chair.” And the guy starts to, in response, walk a little slower. “Now you’ve gotten to that chair, now you’ve turned around, now start to walk toward that chair, now you've gotten in the middle of it, in the middle of the room, now walk over to that chair. [slight pause] Now you’ve gotten there, now you start to turn around. ...” And Erickson slows down more and more. He also does another thing. He stops and takes a breath just before he gives the next instruction to the guy. Now the guy’s gotten used to listening to Erickson telling him where to walk, and without the instruction he doesn’t know where to walk. So he waits for the next instruction and Erickson takes a nice, deep breath. And the guy hesitates. “Now walk over to that chair. Now you’ve gotten there, now start to turn around, now turn around, now walk to that chair. Now

you’ve gotten there, now start to turn around. Now turn around. Now walk to that chair. Now you’ve gotten there. [pause] Now turn around. Now walk over to that chair. Now you’ve gotten to that chair, now turn around. [pause] And walk towards that chair.”

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Gradually he starts to introduce smaller pieces, “Now you’ve gotten halfway there, now you’ve gotten threequarters of the way there, now turn around.” He gets him to hesitate. When he’s three-quarters of the way there he says, “and walk over to the other chair.” He starts to break it up piece by piece. | Then Erickson starts to introduce another element. “Now look at each of the chairs, walk to each of the chairs, and look at each of them and figure out which chair you’d be the least uncomfortable sitting in.” So the man looks at all the chairs, thinks about it a few times as he’s walking back and forth. And he decides that he’d be the least uncomfortable sitting in that chair. So Erickson says, “Now walk toward the chair you’d be the least uncomfortable sitting in, now walk away from the chair you’d be the least uncomfortable sitting in. Now walk towards this chair. Now walk toward the chair you’d be the least uncomfortable sitting in, now walk away from the chair you’d be the most comfortable sitting in. Walk towards the chair, walk towards the chair you'd be the most comfortable sitting in. Walk away from the chair you’d be the most comfortable sitting in.” So, subtly, he starts to change it from the least uncomfortable to the most comfortable chair. Gradually, as he’s hesitating in front of this chair, wondering when he cold possibly sit down on it, walking away from it, walking towards it, he starts to hesitate in front of it, and starts to sit down and Erickson says,

“Don’t sit down yet.” And he walks away from it and walks towards it, and gradually he starts to sit down on the chair, in which he could be the most comfortable. And as he sits down, Erickson says, “As you sit down all the way in that chair you can go all the way into trance.”

Now that’s a different kind of trance induction than “You vill go into a trance” and “Watch the watch.” It’s a different kind of trance induction than “You really have to relax and concentrate in order to go into trance.” It’s a very, very different model. The model is take whatever they’re showing you and include it, utilize it as part of the trance induction.

THE ELEMENTS OF SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

9

Instead of saying, “You have to come to the model I have of hypnosis,” I’'d better come to the model of the world you have and meet you there and help lead you into hypnosis. So this explains the outrageous claim of the Ericksonian approach that everyone can be hypnotized. It’s just the method of finding how they go into trance. That involves utilizing whatever they are showing, validating their responses and building up a responsiveness so that you can find out how this person’s going to go into trance. They can teach you how to induce them into trance. I had a ten-year-old kid come for therapy for school phobias and I was doing some hypnosis with him. I used a counting technique (which I rarely use). I was counting down from 20 to one for him to go into a trance. And I’d say “20, now you can start to go into hypnosis, into a trance, 19... . ” And as I started to talk like that, he started to giggle, he was feeling self-conscious. So he started to giggle. And I said, “I think giggling is a great way to go into trance. ..18... because so many adults usually are so serious about hypnosis. So grim about hypnosis. 17 . . . and I think that giggling your way into trance is a nice way to go into trance... 16.” And I started to talk like that and when I got to 5 in my counting he had stopped giggling. He just went into a more quiet trance. So we did a bunch of trance work. About 25 minutes later I was starting to have him come out of trance and I started to count up from one to 20. And to his surprise and a bit to my surprise, as soon as I got to 5 he began to giggle again, and he giggled his way out of trance from 5 to 20. Now that’s the giggling technique for going into trance, and that was his technique. It’s not my technique and it may not be anybody else’s technique. But that’s his technique. The other guy that we talked about before had the pace-back-and-forth-in-Erickson’soffice technique. Whatever particular approach that the client has, it can be utilized by the hypnotist, by the therapist. It needs to be included, one way or another. People will come in with all sorts of ideas. Some think hypnosis means they have to be controlled by someone else. So what you

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SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

want to do is include in the circle of trance anything that they think can’t be included or might potentially invalidate their trance experience. If they say, “I can’t concentrate,” you’d better include that in there and say, “You don’t really have to concentrate to go into trance.” Whatever their idea is, include it. If they indicate that they think trance necessitates paying attention to everything that you say or they’ll have to really memorize everything you say, you’d better give them permission not to. “You don’t have to memorize everything I say or you don’t have to listen.” If they say, “I don’t think I can go into a trance because I need to be in control,” you say, “It’s okay to be in control and you could discover that you are in control in ways that you don’t even notice, that you might be in unconscious control of things, conscious control of things, but the trance really isn’t about one person controlling another person.” Bandler and Grinder used to make this joke: “You ask people what they think trance is and they’ll say, ‘I won’t see anything, I won't feel, I won’t hear anything,’ and they’d replay, ‘Well that’s dead, now what do you think trance is?’” That was one way to challenge people’s sometimes unrealistic expectations regarding trance. (I used to use that joke until one time I went into a trance where I didn’t see anything, didn’t feel anything, didn’t hear anything. I don’t use that joke anymore.) Usually I’ll give people a little rap as we start and find out what some of their ideas about trance are or some of their apprehensions, some of their frames of reference. Then I'll either include those and say, “Yes, that could happen in trance,” or I’ll dismiss them and say, “Well you know, some people have this idea that they’ll be knocked out while they’re in trance and that’s usually not true.” You can demystify or gently challenge their ideas about trance. I’ll give them a little talk before trance, during trance, or after trance to say “You could include this,” whatever they thought they couldn’t include and/or “This is not a necessity.” Things like “You don’t have to concentrate on everything I’m saying. You don’t have to listen to everything I’m saying” or “You could listen to everything I’m saying, but you don’t have to, you could drift away.” Somehow I have to include whatever they are doing or might do. This is my circle of trance and I want to include a bunch of stuff and then also say that they

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don’t have to do certain stuff. Give them permission and validate them for wherever they are and give them the sense that whatever they are doing is okay. It’s not a block, whether it’s giggling, walking back and forth, not concentrating, or concentrating a lot. Some people come out of trance and say, “I couldn’t have been in trance because I’ve heard everything you said.” So, usually before trance, I’ll say something about that, I'll say, “Probably the most surprising thing is you might be able to hear everything that ’'m saying when you are in trance.” So all of a sudden that includes hearing everything I say when you are in trace, so they won’t come

out of the trance and say, “I couldn’t have been in trace because I heard everything you said.” Just give that permission to do whatever they’re doing. That’s the first thing. Let me give you a handout (1.1) that will summarize some of this stuff. It’s called “Elements of Solution-Oriented Induction.”

Permission/ Validation/Observation/ Utilization The first element is permission, validation, utilization. Utilization means utilizing what people bring to the situation, giving them permission for being whatever they are and then communicating to them that any response they give is okay. Because what we are trying to build up here is a good context, a nice context that facilitates trance and that empowers people, and also a sense of responsiveness. I’m going to find out what it is that you are going to respond to. I’m going to be talking to you about various things, doing various behaviors around you, and I’m going to see which ones you respond to, which ones your body or your experience are going to say, “Yeah, that’s the ticket. I like that one,” and which ones you are going to say, “No, that doesn’t make any sense to me or doesn’t work for me.” I’m going to start to develop some sense of what you respond to and IJ am going to start responding to your responses. Probably one of the most surprising things for me when I went to study with Erickson was how much he stressed observation. Some of you may know of Ernie Rossi. He is a Jungian analyst who has written a lot with Erickson and about Erickson and has written his own ideas as well. He told me a great story one time

Handout 1.1 ELEMENTS OF SOLUTION-ORIENTED

INDUCTION

Permission/Validation/Observation/Utilization Any response/behavior/experience is valid. Any response can be evidence of hypnotic response or be the thing that leads to the hypnotic response. Permissive (“‘can,” ‘‘might’’) vs. predictive (‘“‘will’’) or attributional (‘‘are’’)

Observing and incorporating responses

Evocation vs. Suggestion: The Naturalistic Approach

Presupposition/Implication/Contextual Cues Verbal presupposition: illusion of alternatives; before, during, and after; rate; awareness Behavioral presupposition Contextual cues Altering communication/behavior patterns Matching Nonverbal: rhythms, postures, voice qualities, breathing rate, ongoing observable behavior [mirroring/cross-mirroring]} Verbal: vocabulary, syntax Description Videotalk Truisms

Permissive and Empowering Words Possibility words Outline words Ronald Reagan words: unspecified as to person, place, time, thing, or action

Directing attention and guiding associations Splitting Conscious/unconscious Here, present, external/there, past or future, internal Verbal and nonverbal Linking Verbal and nonverbal Bridging Re-evoking trance-like experiences Interspersal Nonverbal emphasis on words or phrases

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THE ELEMENTS OF SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

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that I really identify with because he said that when he went to study with Erickson, Erickson would either literally or metaphorically sort of jab him in the ribs with his elbow trying to get Ernie to pay attention. As soon as Erickson would start to talk, Ernie’s gaze would start to drift up towards the ceiling. He was thinking about how Erickson was tapping into archetypes or how Erickson was doing something like recombining psychological DNA. Erickson would look over and there were Ernie’s eyes on the ceiling and he would say, “Ernie, the subject is over there, there is no patient on the ceiling.” You can hear Erickson, on one of the tapes, say, “

_.. and you, Dr. Rossi, watch her face.”

When Ernie told me that story, I thought that was exactly like me. My head was so full of theories that Erickson’s training with me mostly consisted of getting me to watch people, listen to people, and not to spend so much time in my head with theories. Out there’s where the data are. So what we are trying to build up is this sense of responsiveness and you'll only know what they are responding to if you observe it. You won’t notice if you are up there on the ceiling thinking about your theories. So that’s the first element, you give permission, validation, utilization. And in order to do that you've got to observe.

Evocation vs. Suggestion: The Naturalistic Approach The second element is more of a philosophical difference than a technique. Instead of trying to program clients with the therapist’s ideas from the outside, what we are really trying to do in Ericksonian hypnosis is what’s called evocation. We are trying to evoke some experience from inside. In fact, that leads me to give you a definition of what hypnosis is. Hypnosis is the evocation of involuntary experience. That’s one definition. I'll give you several definitions as the day goes on.

The Naturalistic Approach Erickson sometimes called his hypnosis naturalistic hypnosis or naturalistic approaches to psychotherapy and I think what that meant was a couple of things. There are two sides to the naturalis-

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tic coin. One of those sides is that he thought people had natural abilities. He had a great trust in nature. He grew up on a farm and really loved nature and he thought people had many natural abilities and that you should respect and use those natural abilities. He thought people had natural abilities to go into trance and also natural abilities to experience trance phenomena. Trance phenomena are things like amnesia, anesthesia, and time distortion, which we’ll discuss in more detail later. Erickson believed that people learn these trance skills through common, everyday experiences. For example if you go to a suspense movie, you

might forget about your headache. That’s perhaps an experience of disassociation or anesthesia or analgesia. He thought that people had natural abilities to distort time, to change time. If you are waiting for a letter or a phone call you really want to have and it’s taking what seems to be subjectively a long time, you’ve changed your experience of time. You do that naturally. In hypnosis, you can expand that capability and direct it. So the first part of this naturalistic approach is that people have natural abilities to go into trance and experience trance phenomena. They go in and out of common everyday trances. They’ve gone in and out of common everyday trances in their lives many times before you do a formal trance. You can trust their natural abilities. The other side of the naturalistic coin is that trance induction doesn’t have to be such a formalized “You will watch the watch” or ritualized thing. It can be a natural conversational approach and you will hear that again and again in the demonstrations I do and some of the work that I play of other people. So in solution-oriented hypnosis we are not trying to teach people things from the outside; we are trying to evoke some experie nce from their insides. We are not trying to impose our ideas and beliefs, saying, in effect, “This is the way to resolve your proble m” or “Here, take these new beliefs as they are much healthier than the ones you’ve got.” We are trying to evoke natural experie nces from inside people and expand and direct those experiences. I am not saying.that we won’t be influencing people and directin g them, just that we are going to be influencing them in the directio n of evoking their own experiences and using them towards achieving their own goals.

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Presupposition /Implication/Contextual Cues The next element and one that is probably in every trance induction and probably all of the psychotherapy I do is using presupposition, implication, and contextual cues. Implication was a big part of Erickson’s work. Erickson was sometimes said to be a directive therapist. His work was very directive and at the same time, it was seen as indirect. How can it be directive and indirect at the same time?

Keep Them on the Road and Keep Them Moving Erickson told a story about when he was growing up. Erickson had polio when he was 17, but before that he was a fairly active kid who lived in a farming area in Wisconsin for much of his growing up years. He told a story about how he was with friends one time a few miles away from his home. People didn’t travel very far from their homes at that point and he and his friends were unfamiliar with this area. They were travelling down a country road and a horse which had obviously thrown it’s rider ran past them. Its reins were all askew and it was very skittish. He and his friends chased the horse into a farmyard, and when they got into the farmyard, they caught the horse and calmed it down. Then Erickson announced, “I’m going to take this horse back home, back to its owner.” His friends said, “We don’t even know whose horse

this is. How’re you gonna do that?” Erickson said, “That’s all right.” He jumped up on the horse, told the horse to giddyup and the horse went out of the farmyard and took a right turn onto the road. Erickson spurred him on down the road. As they were riding down the road, every once in a while the horse tried to go off the road and eat some weed or some hay. Erickson just steered him back on the road and spurred him on. A few miles down the road, the horse turned and

went into another farmyard. The farmer heard the commotion and came out and exclaimed, “That there’s my horse. How did you know how to bring my horse home? I’ve never met you. You didn’t know that was my horse.” Erickson said,

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“That’s right, I didn’t know where to bring the horse, but the

horse knew the way. All I did was to keep him on the road and keep him moving.” When he told that story, Erickson ended with the moral, “I think that’s how you do psychotherapy.”

I think that’s a good model for how you can be directive and indirect at the same time. Erickson was very down on therapists imposing their values and beliefs and theories on people. He was very up on people getting moving in psychotherapy —that’s what he thought was his job. You get them on the road and start them moving and they’ll teach you by their responses. You keep them moving on the road to trance and their goals and then they’ll let you know when they get there by their responses. Probably the simplest way to understand implication and presupposition is to imagine that there’s something that is going to happen or is happening or did happen. That’s a good way to think of it. Like Shakti Gawain’s creative visualizations. Visualize a goal and then you speak as if that goal is absolutely going to happen and then you can speculate within that certainty how that goal is going to be attained. Let’s say that the certainty is that this person is going to go into trance. You visualize this person is going to go into trance. Then you can speak to the person about all the variations and possibilities about how he or she might go into trance: “I wonder if you'll go into trance quickly or if you'll go into trance slowly. I wonder if you’ll go into trance with your eyes open or your eyes closed. Will you be able to hear everything I say as you go into trance, or will you drift off into your own experience going into trance? I don’t really know,” and so on. Offer them a lot of speculation on the process of going into trance but never doubt, always presume and imply that they will go into trance, Another way you can think about it, a way that my colleague Jim Wilk came up with, is to image that you are sitting in front of somebody and you are going to have to put them into trance. You are a little nervous because you are thinking, “Well maybe it won’t work or maybe I won’t be able to do it.” So what you've got to do is give it up to a higher power. Give it up to Milton Erickson .

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Imagine he is standing behind you and he is going to induce the trance because you know you're not up to it yet. So Erickson is going to induce the trance and all I have to do is sit here in front of Glenn (Bill sits in front of a participant in the front row), and I can say to myself, “I can relax, Erickson’s got it covered, he’s behind me and he’s going to do the trance, so all I have to do is speak to Glenn abut the possibilities of what’s going to happen: ‘Is that hand going to lift up to your face as you go into trance? I really don’t know.’” I’m going to be speculating to him like he’s the folks at home and I’m the radio announcer calmly speculating about how the game’s going to go but I already know that he’s going to go into trance because Erickson’s got that taken care of. Or I might be working on the assumption that Erickson has already told me that he is going to do a trance induction and he’s going to do, during this trance induction, a hand levitation. I know Glenn’s going to get a hand levitation and I’m going to be speculating out loud: “Will it be the right hand or will it be the left hand? Will one of those hands start to lift up or will both of those hands start to lift up? I really don’t know. Will you feel a thumb move first, a finger move first?” I’m just going to speculate on the possibilities of how it will happen. I’m never going to doubt that the hand levitation is going to happen. I’m never going to doubt that the trance induction is going to happen. I am just going to speculate on the possible variations that can take place while it is happening. That’s one way of thinking about it, so all of your speaking will be from the certainty that it’s going to happen. The certainty that this goal over here is going to happen and you can doubt anything on the way like whether it would be the right hand or the left hand, whether it would be slow or whether you'll notice that it’s happening or whether you won’t notice that it’s happening, whether you believe that it happens, whether you won’t believe that it happens, what kind of rate at which it will happen. So all of those are verbal presuppositions. Let me give you another handout (1 .2), one that will summarize

some common presuppositions that are used in hypnosis. This one is “Using Presupposition in Hypnosis.”

SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS Handout 1.2 USING PRESUPPOSITION

IN HYPNOSIS

. Give two or more options that lead in the desired direction.

-Would you like to go into trance now or later? -| don’t know if you'd like to close your eyes to go into a trance of if you’ll keep your eyes open. -Would you like to use the recliner or stay where you’re seated to go into a trance? . Presume that something is about to happen.

—Before you go into trance, there are some myths about hypnosis that I’d like to dispel. —Have you ever been in trance before? —When you’re in trance, you can do something nice for yourself. —Don’t go into trance too quickly. . Presume that something is happening. ~-You can go deeper. -That’s right, just continuing. -As your unconscious mind continues to help you do what you need todo’. . . Presume that something just happened. —How was that? -Welcome back! —How did that trance compare with the last one?

-. . . and your unconscious mind can now solve other problems that we haven't even talked about.

. Imply that something is happening, will happen, or just happened by talking about its rate of occurrence. —Don’t go in too quickly. -| don’t know when your unconscious will solve that for you.

. Imply that something is happening, will happen, or just happened and wonder aloud whether that person is aware of that. -| don’t know whether you have noticed that your breathing has changed. -You probably aren’t aware that your unconscious mind is doing a lot of work for you.

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Verbal presupposition has a couple of categories. One of them is called the Illusion of Alternatives. This was initially called the Illusion of Choice by Lawrence Kubie, who wrote some articles with Erickson many years ago. The Illusion of Alternatives technique involves giving two or more choices in which either of the choices that is offered leads to the desired result. Parents all over the world know this technique. It’s “Would you like to watch 15 more minutes of television or have a bedtime story before you go to sleep?” Two or more alternatives are offered and any of the alternatives that are chosen lead in the desired direction: “Would you like to go into a light trance, medium trance, or a deep trance? Would you like to go into a trance with your legs crossed, or would you like to uncross your legs? Would you like to take your glasses off to go into trance, or would you rather keep them on?” All of that is going to presuppose that they are going to go into trance and we are just negotiating what the preferred way is for them to go into trance: “Is your conscious mind going to know that you are going into trance or not know that you are going into trance?” AUDIENCE:

Is it always two?

No, it could be three, four, or five. “Would you like to go into light trance, medium trance, or deep trance” uses three. Sometimes it will be a whole string. You'll hear that in the demonstrations and taped examples later. Another type of presupposition, one I like quite a bit, is the “Before, During, and After” set of presuppositions. Before, during, and after presuppositions imply or suggest without stating it obviously or directly that you are just about to go into this stuff called trance, or that you are in this experience called trance, or that you’ve just been in this experience called trance. Now maybe here’s a good place to demystify trance a little. If a Martian anthropologist came down and observed what we do during this process we call hypnosis, the Martian anthropologist would only see a conversation, would only hear a conversation. I’m usually speaking in my normal hyperactive—I mean kinetic— sort of way and then, all of a sudden, at some point in the conver-

sation I start to slow down, I start to talk to your conscious mind

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. . . your unconscious mind . . . I talk about one part of you... and then the other part of you . . . and then there’s another point where I start to talk in my normal kinetic sort of way again. So nonverbally and verbally I’m going to imply that this is a different conversation. Actually it’s one long conversation and all the Martian can see and hear is that at one point I start to talk funny and you start to act funny during that conversation and then I start to talk and act like I did before and you start to act and talk like you did in the first part of the conversation. There’s a big debate in the hypnosis field that’s not settled yet between the state theorists and the non-state theorists. Erickson was a state theorist. The state theorists say there is such a state as trance. And the non-state theorists say there’s no need for that construct. T. X. Barber is one of the most well known non-state theorists. He holds that you don’t need the construct of hypnosis or trance to explain what happens during one of these conversations. A bunch of the non-state folks are social psychologists and think that trance is just a social psychological phenomenon, that it’s not an internal state at all, it’s a way of interacting. Jay Haley, some years ago, wrote about the interactional explanation of hypnosis and certainly there is a case to be made for that. I guess you could say that there is bad news and good news about all this. The bad news for all of you is that you are in a hypnosis workshop, you’ve paid your money, you’ve gotten here, and there is no such thing as hypnosis. So far the state theorists haven’t proved that there is such a thing as hypnosis. They haven’t found those consistent brain waves for hypnosis yet, like they have in meditation. There are no other consistent physiological measures that are generally accepted that prove that there is such a thing as trance. So the non-state theorists are winning the debate so far. The state theorists have to prove that there is such a state as hypnosis and they haven’t yet. Actually I agree with both points of view because for me being a social constructivist, I think that trance isn’t a thing at all. It’s a distinguished state in language. It’s just like they haven’t been able to measure love yet but you know when you’re in it and other people can usually tell when you’re in it, but they haven’t measured it physiologically yet. There could be non-state theorists and state theorists of love, too, and what I would say about it is it’s distin-

THE ELEMENTS OF SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

Pi

guished linguistically and you start to name it. If you didn’t know the name “love” for the experience you were having, maybe you would think you had the flu or something because you felt weird. But after you give it the name “love” and it’s sort of associated with certain situations again and again, you have the sense that it’s this stuff called love and it works. It’s the same thing with trance. So the bad news is there is no such thing as trance and the good news is it doesn’t seem to matter much for clinical work because I know when you are in one, I can teach you to recognize when

people are in one, I know when I’m in one and that seems to work for clinical purposes. What you are trying to do in using the before, during, and after presuppositions is to build up the idea that there is a thing called trance; that it is a distinct state linguistically and experientially. Partly how you do that is you imply that it’s about to happen, that it is happening, and that it just happened and you do that linguistically. You can do it behaviorally and interactionally also, but we'll get to that in a minute. Let’s stick with the linguistic ways first. Let me give you an example.

THERAPIST: Bob, I am going to ask you a couple of questions. Have you been in trance? One of these formal kind of trances? BOB:

I think so.

Okay. Now let me ask you a different question that sounds somewhat the same: “Have you ever been in trance before?” Now it could be the same answer, but the implication was different. Because, “Have you ever been in trance before” implies that sometime in the future you are going to go into trance—especially given

the context if we are in a hypnosis session, if we are in a psychotherapy session, if we have already discussed that we are going to do hypnosis. The implication is that you are going to go into trance. But I haven’t said, “You are going into trance.” It is just implied. I might say, “Before you go into trance, there are a few myths of hypnosis that I want to talk to you about.” That sounds like a fairly reasonable thing to say. It doesn’t sound like a hypnotic

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suggestion, but it is a suggestion, a suggestion that you are going

to go into trance because I said “before you go into trance.” Those are some of the “before” presuppositions. Then you have the “During” presuppositions. The “during” ones are what I’m going to use when I start to see some signs that the person is showing trance responses or hypnotic responses. (I'll give you a list of those later.) Once I start to see those signs, I’m going to start to imply that you are already in this state called trance and start to talk as if you are in it. So I might say, “That’s right, you can go deeper.” Now if I were in the middle of a conversation with you, why would I say, “That’s right, go deeper?” What are you supposed to go deeper into, the conversation? I’m going to imply that we are having this conversation called trance and in the middle of this there is something different happening: “You can go deeper. You can go all the way in.” Why would I say that in the middle of a conversation? It would be a weird thing to say. But if I had already distinguished this stuff called hypnosis or trance, it’s not such a weird thing to say. Also we use a lot of spatial metaphors for hypnosis and for the mind in general. We say, “Go deeper, go all the way in.” Same thing for the mind. Where’s the back of your mind, as in when you have something in the “back of your mind?” Where’s deep thinking; where do you do you “deep thinking?” So we use spatial metaphors. There is no such space as trance but we use spatial metaphors to understand it, to make sense of it. At a certain point I’m going to imply that trance is over, that this part of the conversation is over. So I might say, “Welcome back.” Now why would I, again, say “Welcome back” during the middle of a conversation unless something has just ended? I might say, “How was that?” If you were having sex with somebody and they said, “How was that?” it would imply that the sex was over, right? Maybe you thought you were in the middle of that conversation. (Laughter) I see some of you have had this experience. If we

say, “How was that,” it implies that something just ended in the conversation. Something is over—something gets distinguished by these words and this thing is called hypnosis or trance or a relaxed state. Whatever name you give it, that’s how it gets distinguished. By the end of this workshop, those of you who haven’t been making the distinction called trance will start to make it a lot more.

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Because we are talking about it so much and I'll be showing it so much, it will start to be distinguished in your experience. One of the things I realized once I made the distinction called trance is how often my clients were putting me in trance, and how to bring myself out of trance once I made that distinction. I also noticed how often my clients were spontaneously going into what I called trance, and how often in common, everyday life I was going into trance and other people were going into trance. So, I started to make this distinction. I don’t know what I was noticing before when my clients were doing this; obviously not that because I never made that distinction. But now I notice it a lot. Once you make the distinction, you will start to notice it quite a bit. AUDIENCE: of trance?

You mean while I’m daydreaming I’m in a type

It depends on the daydream. I would start to observe you and perhaps what you call a daydream I might call a mini-trance if it has some characteristics of what I call trance. After a while you will start to make that distinction. Not everything is a trance. Some things aren’t. That was an idea I heard when I went to some of my first workshops on this stuff, that everybody is always in a trance. You could construe it that way but that dilutes the definition of trance for me. I went to one of the early workshops on Ericksonian stuff, and I watched the tape called “The Artistry of Milton Erickson.” I was watching the first segment of it, and I was fading as I watched it and I thought, “Boy, I was really in a trance watching that because I missed three quarters of it.” Later I realized, “No, I was just asleep.” I was bored, you know? I thought I must be in a trance because they were talking about trance so much, but after I started to make the distinction as the years went on, I realized the difference between sleep and trance. It wasn’t a distinction I made earlier on. If you are daydreaming you'll think, “I must be in a trance.” But after you go into some trances and start to make the distinction again and again, you'll be able to tell whether you were in trance or not. That will be something you decide experientially and observationally. Not only can you do implication linguistically but you can do it

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nonverbally because, again, there will be a certain point WHEN PLL BE TALKING LIKE THIS and then a certain point when I’ll be talking like this. So, behaviorally, I’m going to imply that there is a different conversation going on here, and then I’m going to imply when my behavior changes again that this is no longer a trance conversation. After a while in this workshop all I’ll have to do is look at some of you meaningfully and say, “That’s right,” and you'll start to feel yourself go into a trance, because it’ll be enough of a contextual cue that this is trance talk. Probably right now, unless some of you have been to other Ericksonian workshops, that’s not much of a contextual cue for you, but it starts to get built up by association as a contextual cue. When I work in my office, I have these sort of deadly florescent lights on and, then, when I turn on the incandescent light on the desk and turn off the big lights, that’s a contextual cue for “It’s time to do a trance.” When trance is over I turn on the big lights again and turn off the other light. The next time the person comes into the office and I turn on the incandescent light and turn off the fluorescent lights, it tends to be a cue. Usually they move over to the reclining chair, although it’s not always available because I sometimes use different offices, and it’s not necessary. Usually people move over to the recliner and go into trance. So as soon as I just gesture to the reclining chair, that’s all the trance induction that has to be done after a while. They go to the chair, they close their eyes, they start to go into their own trance. I turn off the overhead lights and turn on the incandescent light. That is what I mean by a contextual cue: This cue is in the context before trance (when the fluorescent lights are on), this cue is present during

trance (the incandescent lights are on), and the cue after trance is

when the fluorescent lights are on again. So, in addition to linguistic cues, we

start to make

behavioral

and contextual

cues that

indicate that this is trance and this is not trance. There are a couple of other linguistic suggestions, implications, presuppositions that we can talk about; one of them is the awareness one. When you use phrases like, “I don’t know whether you are aware...” or “I don’t know if you realize... ” or “I don’t know whether you’ve noticed . . . ,” anything you say after those phrases is implied. That’s what’s presupposed. “I don’t know

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whether you’ve noticed how quickly you are going into trance. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed your responses so far. I don’t know whether you realize that your unconscious mind is doing a lot of thinking for you. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed that your breathing has changed.” All you are doing is asking or wondering or speculating about whether they’ve noticed it, you’re not questioning whether or not it is actually happening. You are only questioning whether they have noticed or not. That’s another type of presupposition. Another presupposition, one that’s related to the before, during, and after ones is rate. “I don’t want you to go into trance too soon tonight,” Erickson says on one of his tapes, “Not yet. . . . ” “Don’t sit down on the chair yet.” We are not doubting that the person will go into trance or sit down on the chair, we are just talking about the rate—how quickly, how soon. Those are rate presuppositions. There are other types of presuppositions, but it would take too long to detail all of them, so let’s move on to the next element of induction, which is matching.

Matching Matching is just joining your body behavior and language behavior to other people’s body behavior and language behavior. Bandler and Grinder make a nice distinction about this. They divide it into mirroring and cross mirroring. Mirroring is when you do things like take the same body posture or you breathe at the same rate as the other person does. Essentially, it’s like miming. You take exactly the same posture they do, you nod when they nod, you pick up the pen in your hand and start to take notes when they do. That’s like a mime. When they breathe, you breathe. When they nod, you nod. Anything that changes in their behavior you match exactly. There is another kind of matching called cross mirroring, and that’s when you don’t exactly take the same posture as they do or breathe at the same rate as they do, but something in your behavior varies along something in their behavior so you co-vary. I used to work in crisis counseling and some people would come

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in or call me on the phone and they would be breathlessly yelling, “aall!@#%$%$#@#S$$$,” and I don’t want to breathe the same way they breathe or I may have a crisis myself or maybe pass out. They are breathing at a rate that doesn’t support feeling calm. They are breathing in a way that freaks them out. So instead of breathing the same way they breathe, I may nod each time they exhale or nod in time to their breathing. I don’t have to take the same body posture. Instead, maybe every time their body moves to one side I could lift up my hand a little. Something about my behavior varies along with something about their behavior. That’s cross mirroring. Not only are we talking physical or biological matching, but it can be linguistic as well. This can be accomplished by using the same words they use, using the same syntax that they use. “I don’t know nothing about nothing,” a client says. “So that tells me you don’t know nothing about not going into a trance,” I reply. One part of the linguistic matching involves the hypnotist mirroring the language and syntax that the person is using.

Description You can also use what I call “Descriptive Matching.” Descriptive matching can be best illustrated by using an analogy. Imagine that you are a radio commentator who is describing the action in this sport of hypnosis to the folks at home with their ears to the radio. You are going to describe the game using only terms that indicate the actions going on on the field. Don’t go beyond what you can see and hear. Strange but true, though, in this game, the folks at home happen to be the person that’s sitting in front of you. So ’m going to describe for Glenn, as if he is the folks at home, what’s happening in the game so far—but only those things that I can observe as if I could see them and hear them on a videotape. I’m not going beyond that. I won’t say to Glenn, “You're sitting in a very relaxed way. Listening very attentively.” That’s getting into his insides, claiming that I have X-ray vision and can see that he is relaxed and attentive. I’m just going to stay with his outside: “You're sitting in a chair, blinking, head moving, nodding, your facial muscles moving. Your hand holding a pen, hand holding a recorder, some part of your body touching another part of your

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body, nodding . . . breathing.” That’s all the stuff I can see. But if I say, “Breathing in a very comfortable way,” I’ve gone beyond what I can see and hear. Descriptive matching is telling people the truth about what you see and hear from your perspective. It’s sort of operating as a human biofeedback machine. I’m just going to tell you what it is that I see and hear. That can have several effects. One is I’m going to get some credibility with you because I’m telling you the truth and not going beyond the truth, and I’m not jarring or intruding upon your experience. The second thing is that my describing your body and the immediate environment is going to start to narrow your focus of attention. Another definition of trance is a narrowing of focus of attention. That’s not the only way but that’s one way. Descriptive matching is the last aspect of matching, and if you go beyond descriptive matching I suggest you go into the next category, which I call “Permissive and Empowering Words.”

Permissive and Empowering Words If you are going to go beyond what you can actually describe to people and what’s credible for them in terms of just being able to see and hear, you want to be able to talk to people in a way that you don’t intrude unhelpfully on their experience or jar them out of trance by saying something that doesn’t fit for them. For example, the person sitting in front of you may appear very relaxed, but inside they may be feeling very anxious, or very aware of their heart beating. If you assume you can read their mind, you may be wrong. To counteract this difficulty, you can use “packaged words.” I call them packaged words because it’s as if you have a package that’s got a label written on it. It arrives in your office from UPS and the label reads “experience.” Now what does the word experience mean? It’s very vague. That is, it’s not specified as to person, place, time, thing, or action. It’s not very specific in terms of specific things you can point to in the world. It’s not sensory-based. So you get this package and you don’t know what’s in it unless you open the package and unpack it in terms of the specific person, place, thing, time, or action. You don’t know what’s in that pack-

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age. Sometimes I call these words “Ronald Reagan words” because they sound so specific but they don’t really mean anything. You probably learned in your counseling training to be concrete and specific. You know, Carkhuff and Truax-land. It’s a great idea and certainly has it’s place. This technique, though, is the exact opposite of that. There is a time to be concrete and specific and very sensory-based and there is a time to be vague as hell and this is the time to be vague as hell. The time to be vague is when you want to. open up the possibility for people to create their own experience and when you don’t want to intrude upon people’s experience by the words that you use. Even though these words are vague, they are not totally wishywashy. It’s going to be more like Garrison Keillor on Prairie Home Companion or any of the old radio theatre programs. You are going to give just enough detail for people to create their own experience and guide them in certain directions. You are not going to say, “You can think about anything, anytime, and anyplace”— that’s a little too vague. You’re going to talk about somewhat specific-sounding things and then channel their experience and guide their associations in certain directions. You'll be directing their inner activities a little without imposing or intruding so much. That’s what Garrison Keillor does. If you saw a movie of Lake Wobegon you'd probably be a little disappointed because he’s just giving you enough to create your own images and ideas of Lake Wobegon. And that’s the idea here—to give people enough guidance and an outline so they can fill in the inside and color inside of the lines on their own. Another way to do it is to include the opposite, the “or not.” If you sense that the person is sitting there relaxed you could say, “And you could be sitting there in a very comfortable way and you don’t have to be comfortable.” Or if you say something that sounds specific and you get a response from the person that indicates what you said is not right for them, you can correct it by including the opposite possibility. So if you happen to say, “And you are sitting there very comfortably,” and you notice their brow furrowing, you can say, “...or maybe you’re not comfortable, I really don’t know.” You can give them permission to feel comfortable or not comfortable or both. You could give them permission to feel com-

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fortable and not comfortable. We'll be talking about that when we talk about trance logic. Erickson’s Tag Questions Erickson would sometimes use tag questions. Tag questions are little phrases at the end of a sentence that turn statements into questions. You'll hear this in one of the examples that we'll play, when Erickson says to a subject, “... and you’re very comfortable, are you not?” He thought it was really important to include the “No” along with the “Yes.” He thought the therapist should say the “No” before the client or subject had a chance to. I saw the Milan Family Therapists do some presentations on their way of ‘ working with families and when giving an interpretation, they say, “So Johnny, he takes care of the whole family, no?” They take back everything that they say as soon as they say it. “He keeps the family stable, no?” The British have a similar phrase: “Isn’t it?”; the French have “N’est-ce pas?” Now I’m going to play the first in a series of audiotaped examples of Ericksonian hypnosis. The point of my playing these tapes and the videotapes you will see later is to give you a number of different people and styles to model, not just my own, which you'll see in demonstrations. I don’t want you to come away from this workshop a Bill O’Hanlon clone or a Milton Erickson clone. This is a general orientation and I'd like you to find your own style within it. This first example is Erickson and it’s from the tape that accompanies the book Hypnotic Realities. Ernie Rossi recorded Erickson working with Sheila Rossi, who was then Ernie’s wife. She is also a psychologist and her name is also Dr. Rossi, so when you hear Erickson elbowing Ernie Rossi in the ribs saying, “Now you, Dr. Rossi, watch her face,” it’s both a message to Ernie to observe and,

it seems, a dissociation suggestion for Sheila. In this example, you'll be able to hear some of the elements that we’ve been talking about, focusing attention, guiding associations, and implying certain things with his voice and using these vague and empty words. Sheila has come in to learn hypnosis, but unlike her husband Ernie, who likes to learn intellectually, she wants to learn experien-

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tially. She wants to learn from the inside out, so what does he do? He brings her back to something in her childhood, this is the evocation approach, tells her that she’s been able to learn this very complicated thing, learning how to read and write and learning how to recognize all those letters, and she’s learned it, she’s learned a complicated thing, she learned it so it became automatic for her so she had perfect mental images so she could recall all those images whenever she needed them. This is going to be an evocation of an earlier experience that she can use to learn this new stuff that’s very complicated, but that she can learn automatically, unconsciously.

Audiotape Example #1: Milton Erickson —Basic Induction . . . Look at the far upper corner of that picture. Now you, Dr. Rossi, watch her face. The far upper corner of that picture. Now I’m going to talk to you. When you first went to kindergarten, grade school, this matter of learning letters and numerals seemed to be a big insurmountable task. To recognize the letter A, to tell a Q from an O was very, very difficult. And then too, script and print were so different. But you learned to form a mental image of some kind. You didn’t know it at the time, but it was a permanent mental image. And later on in grammar school you formed other mental images of words ‘or pictures of sentences. You developed more and more mental images without knowing you were developing mental images. And you can recall all those images. Now you can go anywhere you wish, and transport yourself to any situation. You can feel water. You may want to swim init....

Now that’s very permissive, she doesn’t have to go anywhere, she doesn’t have to transport herself, she doesn’t have to feel water,

she doesn’t have to swim in it, these are all possibilities and she might pick any of them or she might pick none of them. You can do anything you want... .

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That’s a nice expression, and especially the way he says it—it sounds like a little kid, doesn’t it? —declaring, “I can do anything I want.” It somewhat implies again that she’s going to regress back to childhood. This time it’s evoked by certain words, phrases, and tonal expressions. You don’t even have to listen to my voice because your unconscious will hear it. Your unconscious can try anything it wishes. But your conscious mind isn’t going to do anything of importance. You will notice that your conscious mind is somewhat concerned since it keeps fluttering your eyelids. But you have altered your rate of breathing. You’ve altered your pulse. You’ve altered your blood pressure. And without knowing . . . it you’re demonstrating the immobility that a hypnotic subject can show. . . . That last little segment introduces the next piece that I want to teach and that is the use of what I call splitting. In this particular aspect of splitting we are going to be focusing on using splitting for induction, but later on we are going to use it in other areas of hypnosis and hypnotherapy.

Splitting Splitting is distinguishing between two things that haven’t been distinguished before or separating into parts something that was seen as a unified thing. Typically, the split that’s proposed in induction in this particular approach is a split between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. Now I| want you to keep in mind that these are linguistic splits and distinctions, not distinctions in the real world. They have done a lot of autopsies and never found any unconscious minds inside anybody or conscious minds inside anybody. It’s just like left brain, right brain. They’ve never found any right brains or left brains either. They just found little creases there. The distinction “right brain or left brain” is made up by human beings and language, biology didn’t make that one up. Human beings make these distinctions up. It’s like T.A. I was joking yesterday that when T.A. was popular, people would come into

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my office and talk in T.A. terms. It was if they had three little circles tattooed on them, P, A, and C. But they’ve never found

those in autopsies and they are not real. There are no parents inside you. It’s made up linguistically. It may be a useful way to distinguish your experience, but it’s made up. Descartes proposed the mind/body split and a lot of people bought it, but there’s no such split in the world as “mind/body.” So conscious and unconscious is first going to be proposed as a

split, then we are going to lead in the direction of the unconscious mind, and then we want people to come out of trance and we are going to lead in the direction of the conscious mind. First we just propose a split and we do that verbally and nonverbally, so listen and watch as I do this: CONSCIOUSLY YOU MAY NOT REALLY KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO GO INTO A TRANCE, your unconscious mind may have a lot of experience already going into a trance. SOQ CONSCIOUSLY YOU COULD BE SITTING THERE WONDERING WHETHER THIS IS GOING INTO A TRANCE and your unconscious mind could already be helping you go into a trance. What I’ve done is to talk about you as if you have two parts, conscious and unconscious but, at the same time, I’ve done it non-

verbally and verbally. P’'ve done it nonverbally by doing the conscious mind over here (leaning to the right side) and the unconscious mind over here (leaning to the left side). Conscious mind with this voice tone, voice value, this facial expression, and this

special location and voice tone for the unconscious mind. Now you don’t have to do it that particular way. It just happens that I and most of the people who studied with Erickson do it that way because we sat in front of Erickson who, near the end of his life

when he was really disabled with the aftereffects of polio and some of the muscle deterioration that happened, did it that way. He had learned earlier on in his career to use his voice in a very precise way. So, later on, when he would have a muscle spasm and his body would move here and there uncontrollably, he’d learned to use that to mark things out and emphasize things in this way.

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He’d have a spasm and talk about the unconscious mind over here. He’d have another muscle spasm and talk about the conscious mind over there. Those of us who sat in front of him in trance for years or months or days or whatever it was, developed this sort of Erickson bob and weave that we do, as we modelled on that particular technique. Sort of like Ray Charles doing trance or something, we talk about the conscious mind over here and the unconscious mind over here and the conscious mind over here—we distinguish it verbally and nonverbally. To induce the trance, then, we lead over here into unconscious land for a while and talk about the unconscious, using those “unconscious” voice tones and voice volumes and facial expressions that I use. And then when it’s time to come out of trance, we lead back to the conscious mind.

In a similar way, we initially begin with an external focus of attention and a here-and-now focus, and then go in a direction of an internal focus of attention. And instead of here and now, go to there-and-then — any place other than here, at any time other than now, the past or the future. So you might direct a person’s attention toward an internal focus by saying, “Perhaps you haven’t yet noticed a particular feeling of warmth in one of your hands or both of them.” Closing your eyes automatically directs your attention internally, for most people. “There and then” can be yesterday, or when you were four years old, or two weeks from now—anytime other than here and now. I may tell a story about learning to write, how hard it was initially to hold that pencil and make those lines the correct way. How, at first, “b” and “d” looked the same and were easily confused, while now I don’t even think about which is which, it’s automatic. The common experience of learning to identify letters of the alphabet has occurred in childhood for all of us (unless perhaps you’ve just recently learned to read). And so the story directs the person’s attention to a time in the past, split from the present here and now. We can also make a split between now, when the particular problem is present, to a time in the future when the problem is no longer present. We start to lead in that direction—internal, there and then, and, likewise, when it’s time to come out of trance, we lead in the opposite direction and bring people back to a more external focus

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of attention, the more here-and-now focus. First, we propose a split, then we move on to one side of the split, and then we move back to the other side of the split to come out of trance. Splitting is making distinctions and disassociating certain things that have been associated or making a distinction in a unified element and breaking it up into pieces. You are the unified element and we are going to propose that you split yourself up into pieces— the conscious and unconscious aspects of your experience.

Linking A complementary skill is linking. Linking is joining two things together that haven’t been joined before. You can do linking verbally and nonverbally, as well. There are various kinds of linkages that one could propose. First, there are usually several levels of verbal linking: (1) conjunction— where you put two things together by using a conjunction in between them: “You are sitting in the chair and you can go into trance.” Now there is nothing about sitting in a chair that makes you go into trance inherently, but as soon as I propose that linkage it’s a little more likely: “Youre sitting in a chair, listening to my voice, and you can go into a trance.” Now if I want to make a stronger implied connection, I can use what we call a (2) contingent suggestion or contingent linkage. Contingent linking has two typical forms. One is “as,” “while,” and “when”: “As you're sitting in that chair, listening to my voice, you can go into trance,” “When you sit all the way down in that chair, you can go all the way into trance,” “As you sit all the way down in that chair you can go all the way into trance,” “While your conscious mind is listening and wondering whether you are going into trance, your

unconscious mind can help you go into trance.” So it’s implying some sort of linkage between those two or three things that are happening. The other kind of contingent linking is “the more this, the more that” or “the less this, the less that” or “the more this, the less

that.” So I could say, “The more your conscious mind is distracted by the sounds in the room, the easier it can be for your unconscious mind to help you go into trance, since it’s freed up from the domi-

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nation of your conscious mind.” There the link is the more you are distracted, the more you go into trance. That’s a good linkage to propose if they are going to be distracted. That’s contingent linking. The strongest level of linkage is (3) causal linkage in which you claim that something causes or will cause another thing. I rarely use this strong linkage, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, because the person might feel coerced or you or they might fail. Sometimes you can use cause and effect, and the way I usually use it is about things that can’t be checked, like “Being in trance will make your unconscious mind do a lot of creative thinking.” It is not very easy to check that kind of thing. Sometimes I call solution-oriented hypnosis “hypnosis for chickens.” It is not animal hypnosis, you know, for chickens, but it is for chicken therapists who don’t want

to fail or have their clients fail. So we are trying to create a context where it is impossible for you to fail. You just can’t fail at doing this because we create this climate and this opportunity for you to do this, and we incorporate whatever it is that you are responding to.

There are other kinds of linking that can be used. I talked about —incorporating clients’ objections or their beincorporating earlier havior. That’s a utilization approach. Bridging is that technique Erickson used with the guy who was pacing back and forth, he bridged from where the guy was, this nervous guy who couldn’t sit down and get therapy, into a guy who was sitting down and going into trance. By putting little stepping stones across what seemed an uncrossable river, one stepping stone was hesitating a little in front of the chair, the other one was linking comfort to the chair, another one was speaking slower so the guy could walk slower, Erickson linked each of those elements in there to help the guy get to where he was going. Utilize where the person is now, based on their own report and/or their observed behavior, and bridge it to trance. Notice where the person is at, validate that, and bridge it over to

trance, by using small steps rather than trying to make that one big leap. The last category under the heading of linking is re-evoking trance-like experiences. Evoking, helping the person evoke, typical everyday trance-like experiences like driving a car long distance where you go into that highway hypnosis kind of thing, or sitting

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in a movie theater so lost in the movie that you don’t realize time is going by. Those are common everyday trance experiences that you can evoke and link to the trance. You may have the person recall some typical trance-like experience, or you may tell a story about a trance-like experience of your own, or of another person that is a common experience, and evoke it that way. Of course, if a person has been in trance before, you can re-evoke that experience itself.

Interspersal The last element on that sheet that you have is the interspersal technique. It is a combination of splitting and linking. Let me give you an example that Erickson gave when he was doing supervision with me that was really memorable. He said that some patient in the mental hospital gave the staff this note: I am going to a place where there are no bad mad people. He gave it to me and several people that were there, and he said, “What was the patient trying to say to us?” So he gave me the note and I looked at it upside down and I tried several creative interpretations, and he snatched it out of my hand and said, “You've failed miserably at that.” Those of you who’ve read Taproots, don’t give it away, because the answer’s in there. (Partici-

pant: I’ve got one idea: “I am going mad.”) That’s exactly right, that’s the answer. You are right, for $100,000. Bzzzzzt. I am going mad. Why is that distinguished? Because it has darker letters. Erickson made the riddle a little harder because all he did was make it a little darker and he had really bad handwriting. The guy in the mental hospital was so afraid of articulating his thought that he was going to go mad, he figured if he said it out loud, he would go mad, so he had to disguise it in some way. He gave it to the staff and all the staff passed it around and couldn’t get it. Erickson, of course, figured it out, brilliant genius that he was, because these words were slightly emphasized. Now, I’ve made it a lot more obvious making them bold for you. Embedded in this larger message is a sub-message, a subtext, that says, “I am going mad.”

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Erickson figured if patients can do this multiple-level communication, why can’t therapists? Why can’t hypnotists? His example made it very memorable for me. So, he made up a hypnotic technique called interspersal where in the entire text he would make a subtext that was emphasized nonverbally in some way that would emphasize suggestions. If he wanted a person (this is a silly example) to scratch their nose, he might say, using voice emphasis: “Now everybody knows that in hypnosis you have to start from scratch.” A serious example is the case in which you want to help a person with back spasms or back pain relax the muscles in their back. So you might say: “Now you might be able to remember back to a time when you were more relaxed. Or more comfortable, I really don’t know. But somewhere in your background you have experiences of relaxation, you have experiences of comfort.” Now what have I emphasized here? Back—relaxed, back—comfort, back—comfortable. That’s interspersal. “And I really don’t know how tense your muscles might be right now, but I do know that some time in the past your muscles have been relaxed and those relaxed muscles in your background can really help you in the future to be more comfortable, to be more relaxed. Even though you consciously can’t imagine how your back could feel more comfortable.” I’ve emphasized certain words: back, relaxed, muscles relaxed,

back relaxed, muscles comfortable. When I emphasize those words, they become interspersed, indirect suggestions. You can emphasize by tone of voice, volume, or rate of speech, by location—the Erickson bob and weave we talked about earlier, for example—by any nonverbal means. By touching their arm at certain words, or by moving your hand or some other body part if the person has her eyes open. Some people call this interspersal technique “analogical marking” —it’s the same thing. If I wanted to use this technique in induction, one of the things I might do, especially if you are worried or skeptical or didn’t think

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you could go into trance, is say to you, “now I really don’t know if you consciously believe that you can go into a trance, I really don’t know if you are certain how deeply you could go into a trance. And if you really know how quickly you could go into a trance.” What have I said? I’ve just been talking about their skepticism, but the words I’ve been emphasizing are: go into a trance, go deeply into a trance, go quickly into a trance, go into a trance. On one level I’m just matching their conscious skepticism and on another level I’m giving them suggestions about going into a trance.

I hope I don’t have to convince you that this technique is to be used for the client’s benefit, not for your benefit. I was at a swap meet one time and I was walking around what was like a glorified garage sale, but they also had some commercial exhibits. One guy was selling knives that were sort of like Ginsu knives. He had these knives and he was doing this demonstration, and he had a little wireless mic on and he was doing a demo. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the handles on these knives, even though they are plastic, are very strong.” At that he took a hammer and pounded it on the handle. The hammer bounced off. Pretty impressive. He had this crowd around him, entranced. I was standing at the back of the crowd watching his sales strategies. Then he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, if you take this knife and you put it down your garbage disposal and you turn on your garbage disposal, do you know what happens?” (You figure he’s going to say that nothing happens, the knives are intact.) Instead he says, in a very dramatic voice,

“Ladies and gentlemen, it chews it!” I was so shocked that I literally jumped back and watched to see if anybody else noticed what he had just said, but they were all just sort of listening to his spiel, and he just went on as if nothing had happened. I walked around the swap meet and when I came back around he was doing the same spiel, using the same exact words. When he got to that part, I listened to hear if he did it the same and he said, “It chews it!” I

looked at him and caught his eyes for a moment, to see if he knew that he was dong this and he didn’t seem to have any idea. But he knew‘enough to do it the same way each time because it sold a lot of knives. He was emphasizing the words chews it (choose it) in that particular presentation. Buy this knife, choose it. He didn’t realize he was doing that.

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Now, I don’t want advertisers to use this, but if you are going to try to sell things to clients that are for their own benefit, that are to help them achieve their goals, then I don’t have an ethical objection to the use of this technique. That’s why I think it’s important to use these techniques, all of them, in an ethical way. What I mean by “ethical” is influencing them not for your benefit, but for their benefit. Of course you are going to benefit if they get better, but I’m saying don’t use them merely or mainly for your benefit, as in getting them to do things that they don’t want to do or are inappropriate for them to do. The interspersal technique is the last basic element in the list. Those are the basic building blocks that you are going to use to put together a trance induction today. Perhaps at this point it seems a bit overwhelming, but take my word for it, you will soon be using these elements as we get you to do some exercises incorporating them, one by one, into your repertoire. Now let me play you another audio transcription that shows how these elements are put together. This is another example of an Ericksonian induction but not by Erickson. This is Jeff Zeig, president of the Erickson Foundation, who teaches a lot of workshops. This isn’t a formal trance induction. It’s what we call a “conversational” trance induction. Jeff is doing a workshop on Ericksonian hypnosis. As he introduces the workshop, though, he does a subtle trance induction with his audience. He doesn’t tell the people in the audience that it is a trance induction, he just does it. So you can listen and you can hear the elements of it, the splits that he proposes, the empty words that he uses, the suggestions for age regression and another technique that I haven’t talked about called the confusion technique. Let’s listen to it: It’s just a few minutes long.

Audiotape Example #2: Jeff Zeig — Conversational Induction This is an introductory workshop on hypnosis for people who haven’t had a lot of experience in hypnosis before. Now I think that you’re here because you really want to know some-

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thing about hypnosis. And one of the things to understand about hypnosis is to have hypnosis actually defined for you. What is hypnosis? It’s a state of focused awareness where the awareness is focused on what’s immediately relevant. Now human functioning is characterized by the fact that we have a conscious mind and also by the fact that we have an unconscious mind. As you sit here and you listen to me, your attention can be divided so that you notice your position in the room, you notice that fact that your feet are on the floor, you may notice certain areas of tension in your body as you begin to settle in and slow down. You may notice the colors on the wall, the sounds in the room and realize that there’s somebody sitting to the right of you and probably also someone sitting to the left of you. Now in that state of focused awareness, of hypnosis, rather than being bothered by the different foci of attention, you’re focused on what’s immediately relevant. Now I can give you an example for your elucidation. You think of a five-year-old boy who’s getting ready for Christmas or getting ready for a birthday and you think of how that mind works. Being really focused on that event that’s coming up. And the amount of feeling is a tremendous amount of feeling because there’s been a lifetime worth of experience in those years, a lifetime worth of experience to rely on, and a lifetime worth of experience that can be utilized in positive ways. And the tremendous amount of specialness that that child feels going into that birthday party or looking forward to that Christmas. And knowing the amount of attention that will be focused. Thinking about what he’ll get as a gift. What special gift there’ll be from people around him. What special kind of surprise there’ll be from people around him. And the tremendous amount of anticipation that’s felt in terms of that specialness. And knowing that there’s a history of other events before that, previous special events, previous occasions, that were looked forward to with a similar kind of anticipation, with a hope of future anticipations for other special events that will be there, that should be there. And the amount of feeling that that child has and the understandings that that child has that have to do with things that

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will happen that they can realize consciously and the amount of effort that it takes to open that gift, to unwrap the gift. To realize that some will be very interested in opening up the wrapping and saving the wrapping and doing that in a very neat and orderly way. And some people will be interested in opening up the wrapping by just ripping it apart and going straight for the, for the prize. And all of the different orientations that someone can have in being involved in that kind of activity. And the fact that sometimes a child opens up the wrong gift—a gift that wasn’t exactly meant for him or her. And the child has to learn something in that regard. With an understanding that there’s a history involved there. Okay, again, he’s evoking a previous experience from early childhood when you anticipate something nice. A birthday or Christmas, or something you are going to get that you really want to get. So he’s evoking some motivation, some experience, some feeling, of pleasant anticipation. Again, he’s maybe bringing some people back into their childhood experiences by inviting them to do a little age regression. And that there’s a series of mistakes that that child makes. And sometimes a child makes the right mistakes for the wrong reason. And sometimes a child makes the wrong mistakes for the right reasons. And some of those mistakes that are right now can be wrong at a later time, and some of the wrong mistakes now can be made right at a later time, and some of the understandings now that can be misunderstood at a later time, can only be understood at a far later time. And that whole series of events is given, relegated, to the unconscious mind, where it becomes a storehouse of learn-

ings, potentials that can be realized.

The Confusion Technique Okay, he’s just used a technique that I don’t use very much but you should know about. Erickson used it quite a bit and many Ericksonians use it as well. It’s called the confusion technique. The

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confusion technique is when you start to say so much in such a confusing way that the conscious mind just can’t process it so the person just gives up and lets go of that conscious control, if you will, or conscious processing. Jeff is using the confusion technique here. He typically takes polar opposites and then starts to mix and match them and pair them in such a way that the conscious mind can’t possibly follow, in fact it would be hard for me to point them out as quickly as he says them. reason right ________ understandings ________

mistakes wrong misunderstandings

NOW ie: Slater That’s a trance induction that’s imbedded in a conversation. He’s giving a fairly lucid lecture on hypnosis. At the same time, he’s doing the lecture within the structure of an induction. By now you may be starting to recognize that structure because we have taken some of the elements of it apart. He used the elements of matching where people are: As you sit here and you listen to me, your attention can be divided so that you notice your position in the room, you notice that fact that your feet are on the floor, you may notice certain areas of tension in your body as you begin to settle in and slow down. You may notice the colors on the wall, the sounds in the room and realize that there’s somebody sitting to the right of you and probably also someone sitting to the left of you. empty words: And the amount of feeling is a tremendous amount of feeling because there’s been a lifetime worth of experience in those years, a lifetime worth of experience to rely on, and a lifetime worth of experience that can be utilized in positive ways.

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guiding associations and directing attention: You think of a five-year-old boy who’s getting ready for Christmas or getting ready for a birthday and you think of how that mind works. Being really focused on that event that’s coming up. and splitting: now human functioning is characterized by the fact that we have a conscious mind and also by the fact that we have an unconscious mind. He marked out some words, interspersed some suggestions (“slow down”).

Various elements of the Ericksonian induction technique we were talking about were included in this “lecture.”

TWO

Demonstration, Exercises, and Examples of Induction

Ne THAT YOU HAVE HEARD some examples and learned the elements, it is time to do a demonstration for you. This will put all these elements together, because right now it might seem to you like a book that my friend, Jim Wilk, saw in a golf pro shop that was called 365 Things to Remember About Your Golf Swing. The purpose of the exercises and demonstrations that will follow is for you to begin to put these elements together in a seamless way. Later you can add the artistry and the poetry. Tomorrow we will add the direction and therapeutic techniques. What I'd like is to have somebody come up on this chair who would like to experience trance. That could be either somebody who has never experienced trance before and is curious and interested to find out what that experience would be or somebody who has been in trance before.

Demonstration #1: Basic Induction (Dennis has volunteered.)

BILL: Okay. Now the first question I have for you is: Have you

ever been in one of these formal trances before? DENNIS: Yes.

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BILL: A fair amount, a few times? DENNIS: A few times. BILL:

Do you wear contact lenses?

DENNIS:

No.

Just a technical note, usually with the advances in contact lenses, people can keep them in while you do trance, but occasionally people have the old kind or for one reason or another, they may want to remove them. It’s probably a good idea to give them the option of removing them, blinking often enough, or keeping their eyes open if they wear the contacts. BILL: Okay. So when you have been in trance before, has it usually been sitting in a chair, has it usually been eyes closed or eyes open? DENNIS:

Sitting in a chair usually —eyes closed.

BILL: Eyes closed usually. And have you ever had any of those trance phenomena experiences, like hand levitation or arm levitation or amnesia or time distortion or glove anesthesia or anything like that? DENNIS: Amnesia, I thought... BILL: You thought you had it but you forgot. (Laughter) DENNIS:

Maybe hand levitation, I can’t remember . . . (Laugh-

ter)

BILL: Okay. Possibly hand levitation. All right, so you don’t really know. Good. I suppose the best way to start is exactly like that with your arms uncrossed and your legs uncrossed. And I usually tell people that, not because they have to do that, because you can go into a trance in any sort of way, but if you keep your legs crossed or whatever, then sometimes your leg falls asleep while you are in trance, okay? So I guess if you are going to close your eyes, you might as well do that now, and for me to remind you that there is no particular right way or wrong way for you to go into trance... and that your job... is just to do whatever you do, experience whatever you experience . . . and to include in your experience anything that might have been a distraction, resistance,

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or difficulty . . . so that you can in your own way, find your own way into trance. Each person’s trance is as unique as their fingerprints . . . and each trance of yours is unique . . . that’s right... making whatever adjustments you need as you go along for your comfort . . . physical adjustments . . . psychological adjustments .. emotional adjustments ... so that you can consciously include whatever you need to include in terms of your thoughts, your feelings, your sensations, you might be distracted by sounds around . . . distracted by your own thoughts . . . so that your unconscious mind can create a trance experience for you that’s appropriate for you and remember to give yourself permission to respond as you respond and to validate yourself for those responses and you don’t have to go into trance any deeper than is appropriate for you right now. So you can allow yourself to go into the kind of trance that’s right for you... and consciously at first you can include the thought that you might not go into the trance that you want or that you might be trying so hard that it’s getting in the way. So there is nothing in particular that you need to do to go into trance . . . and you might be going deeper as time goes on or you might find yourself going deeper then coming out a little, then going in even deeper, coming out a bit more and going back in. Or you just might find yourself staying exactly at that level, having that be comfortable for you, I don’t really know. . . . Sometimes when people are in trance, and they appear to be comfortable from the outside and they tell me later that their heart was beating, that they were feeling a little uncomfortable, so if either of that’s happening you can include that in your trance experience . . . and what can you experience in trance? . . . what you have experienced in trance before or something different. I feel something changing in my perceptions as I go deeper into trance. In trance you might change time. When I was a kid, I went to catholic school and it was a fairly oppressive atmosphere . . . and I couldn’t wait to get out of class every day at 3:00 every day. And it always seemed to me that last half an hour, from 2:30 until 3:00, was the longest half hour of the day, especially since we had an industrial clock in the front of the classroom on which the hands would stick on a certain number for what seemed like, to that boy sitting in the desk, hours and hours, but what was probably only a few minutes

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of clock time. So what I didn’t realize at the time was that I was learning a lot that would do some good for me later when I wanted to use time distortion in hypnosis . . . that watching those hands stick on the 6 and then jump up three minutes and stick on the 2:33 and then jump up another minute in a few seconds, I was learning how to change time, expand time so that I had all the time that I needed in trance to have the experiences . . . that I wanted to have in trance. I was also learning how to divide my attention, because one part of my mind was on the clock in the front of the room,

one part of my mind was on what was going on in the

classroom, the teaching, the activity, and another part of my mind was anticipating what I was going to do after I got out of class. Just the freedom and the play that I’d experience. So in trance, you can change time to make sure that you have all the subjective time that you need that’s different from clock time. Because calendar time and clock time are different. When I was flying back from Australia last year, the captain came on the intercom and said, “In

two minutes it will be yesterday. If you didn’t like the Easter you had this year, you can have another one.” So calendar time is different from internal time. Clock time is different from internal time and you can have all the time that you need in there . . . now you talked before about that experience of hand levitation, arm levitation. And J think that earlier on in our lives we learn to move in a different way from the conscious ways we learn to move later . . as a child, as an infant . . . if you’ve ever observed infants,

they move their hands in sort of jerkier spasmodic ways and the research indicates they don’t even know when a hand flashes in front of their face that that hand belongs to them . . . ’cause they don’t have a sense of differentiation yet, they don’t make that distinction. So the hand flashes in front of their face and after a while they get that it’s correlated, that a certain feeling inside their body and pretty soon . . . they learn to reach for things. So those earlier experiences of movement can be the seeds for that automatic lifting, that becomes hand levitation, arm levitation where that hand

starts to lift on it’s own, but the conscious mind really doesn’t have to levitate it. That’s right, and usually what I suggest is that it lift up to your face, it doesn’t have to, but it could lift up to your face on its own. And you consciously could be monitoring that or

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noticing that or you could be drifting off into your own thoughts or experiences somewhere else and that hand could continue and the arm can continue to lift up towards your face and usually I suggest that that becomes linked to something you’d like to experience. As that hand lifts up, arm lifts up and as it touches your face, or as it’s lifting up off your thigh to your face it can be linked to be working on some issue you’ve wanted to work on, getting a new perspective on things, that you’ve wanted to see from a new perspective . . . creating a little more choice in there about some area

you would like to have a little more choice about or just learning to go deeper as the hand and arm lifts up in its own way, of its own rate and of its own pace. . . and will it lift all the way to the face, I don’t really know .. . and maybe you don’t really know consciously, but your body knows, your unconscious mind knows, how much further it will lift up. Sometimes there’s that old expression that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. So it could be that . . . and what you discover is that the left hand starts to lift as well and it doesn’t have to, it’s just a possibility. And sometimes, what people find is the hands start to have sort of a race up to their face, I think that’s interesting to experience to find out the rate at which the hands move up, ’cause I always figure if you are gonna have competition with yourself you might as well set it up so that you win either way. So whichever hand wins, you win by having the trance learning, the trance experience, or if it’s just that right hand that continues to lift up, that you can have an experience that you want in trance. And I can give you another

invitation in trance, and the invitation is to have one or both of your hands go numb, which they call glove anesthesia in hypnosis. Glove anesthesia is as if you put on a glove that carries within it topical anesthetic that makes the hand feel cool or numb or disassociated just detached . . . because when you have that hand and arm levitation can be a little disarming at first till you learn to feel comfortable with it or just detach from it. So I can reach over and touch one of your hands lightly and you may feel the touch or you may not feel the touch. . . but the aftereffects of that touch can turn into a numbness or coolness that might actually happen in the other hand surprisingly or it might have already happened in one or both of the hands. As that hand continues up towards your

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face, learning even more about your ability to respond and trust yourself at the deeper levels, the unconscious level, and be more freed up to work with yourself instead of against yourself. More aligned consciously and unconsciously—like you’re lining up all the tumblers in a lock and things just become aligned in a way that the lock goes open and do you know where those hands are right now? ...and do you know how much farther the hands will move, how much more? And your attention can be divided between what it is that you want to experience, what it is that you are experiencing and distractions. That those main experiences and you can validate yourself for the responses that you make... that’s right . . . responding in a way that is really right for you . . . to the level that’s right for you . . . to help you face things in a different way, to have your unconscious help you move towards goals . . . when I ride in airplanes I go into my travel trance... put on my music and I read or I write . . . the next thing I know I'm at my destination. I can just learn to pull into my cocoon, take care of myself in various ways and act appropriately, it’s like driving to work with the same route everyday . . . you know that you got there somehow but you didn’t recognize all the scenery all of the time and you didn’t remember turning on your blinker going into another lane, but somehow you have a vague memory that you must have done that right because you seem to have gotten to work in one piece, feeling pretty comfortable not having noticed what you have done, where you have been. Now because of our time frame, what I suggest is that you take about another minute or two of clock time, as much internal subjective time as you need to complete your experience in trance today . . . and that probably will mean allowing those hands to drift back down to your thighs or placing them down there deliberately, whatever is right for you and starting the process of reorientation to the present time and the present place. Remembering you sitting in your body in a chair in this particular room, at this particular time and when you're ready, as that hand or those hands touch your thighs or legs, that’s right, you can start to begin the process of reorientation. When you are ready to come all the way out of trance you can put yourself all the way back together, open your eyes and come all the way out. . . . Good, okay. Pilot to co-pilot. How was that?

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DENNIS:

It was good.

Let’s open it up to a few questions and comments from the peanut gallery here and find out what they have to say. Questions or comments about what you observed? AUDIENCE: done?

Do you always stretch and yawn when you are

Usually. It’s a contextual cue saying, “Hey, this hypnosis stuff is over. We are having a different conversation now. Reorient to your body; I’m going to reorient to mine.” I’m moving around, touching my body. That’s what people usually do when they reorient from a trance, so I give the cue to come out of a trance nonverbally as well as verbally. There’s another purpose for my body stretching. While doing trance with the person, I’ve also been in trance. So I reorient myself to my body as a way of coming out of that trance. Other questions or comments?

AUDIENCE: How come we all didn’t go into trance when you were doing this? Some people did and some people didn’t. My induction is just an invitation, it’s not a demand, so some people will take me up on the invitation, will ride on the demonstration trance, and some won't. As the days go on though, I think more and more people will ride on it as they get more experience and trust of the process. I think some people at this point are probably freaked out about the process of trance. I’m not certain, but having done other seminars and talked to enough people, they are still thinking at this point, “I don’t want anybody to control me, I don’t want anybody to make me cluck like a chicken” and stuff like that. They really have weird ideas, like the idea that trance can control people. Once they get more trust with themselves in the process they are more willing to take a risk, but it’s okay with me if they do and it’s okay » with me if they don’t. This induction was mainly oriented towards Dennis and whoever could ride on it could ride on it. But I wasn’t oriented towards

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them. If you were in front of me and you were having some concerns or objections, hopefully you would be coaching me to include what I need to include for you rather than for Dennis, because I was mainly speaking to Dennis’s experiences during that demonstration. If you and Dennis were up here it would have been more likely that both of you would have gone into trance, even if you hadn’t gone in while sitting there. Because I would be aiming it a little more at your experience and to what you were teaching me was working for you. You would be teaching me that by giving me some sort of responses, your hand would be moving or not, you would be frowning or nodding or you wouldn’t be nodding. You would be breathing differently, so your coaching would have influenced what was happening up here. AUDIENCE: I noticed that when you were talking about hand movements I went to my face to scratch and I didn’t really mean to, and I looked around the room and a lot of people were moving their hands. Sure. That could be from just sitting and watching something for a while, people do fidget a little; but it could have been influenced by what I was saying. AUDIENCE:

Were you in a trance?

Yes, of course. I’ve been in a trance all day, haven’t you noticed?

I was in a different kind of trance here—very much focused on Dennis. An externally focused trance. Now if he were going to put me in a trance, I usually have my glasses off and my eyes would have been closed and I would have looked much more like he did. I was in an externally focused trance, narrowing my focus of attention. I wasn’t really much noticing you folks out there. I was much more focused on him and my facial muscles flattened out a bit and my speech was different than it is right now. So, yes, I was in a trance.

Hopefully this demonstration had something to do with what I taught this morning. I wasn’t really paying attention to doing everything I taught, I just do it on automatic pilot. Hopefully you

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were able to see and hear some about.

of the elements that we talked

AUDIENCE: I noticed your breathing was mimicking and mirroring his, and as he exhaled you spoke. That’s right, except at certain special times, which I'll talk about later. I was keeping time with the movement of my head as well. I did the conscious and the unconscious dissociation a bit. AUDIENCE: It seems like you were using confusion technique, there was a lot you were saying, and it had the effect for me of creating some confusion. Yes, it was a little hard to follow sometimes, partly because my phrases were broken up because I stopped talking when he stopped exhaling and I started talking when he exhaled again. So that’s a little hard to follow logically and linearly, that can be somewhat confusing. But in general, I don’t favor using confusion. I find it to be a bit disrespectful and tricky. AUDIENCE:

And you were mirroring his body postures.

A lot, yes.

AUDIENCE: When Dennis’s eyes closed he couldn’t see that, so is that more for you than it was for Dennis? Well, he can hear the distinctions; he can hear the differences.

Even if he doesn’t process it consciously I think he can hear it at some level, so even with his eyes closed tonal distinctions are very powerful, spatial location ones are fairly powerful as well. When I said lift up . . . that gets communicated even with his eyes closed in the process. Any questions or comments from you, Dennis? Did you experience the numbness in your hand?

DENNIS:

I wasn’t sure I felt you touch my hand.

Okay, one more question.

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AUDIENCE: You seem to offer more experiences from your own personal background rather than to offer choices for him to experience. Is there any difference? Telling personal stories is just one of the ways to offer possibilities. I didn’t say you have to experience what I experienced, I was trying to evoke something from his experience by telling something from mine, which is typical in storytelling. You just tell stories about yourself and people will either ride on those experiences or they won’t. So, yeah, I told some of my experiences as possibilities for him to create his own experience. My guess is that some of you out there and maybe you, Dennis, when I was talking about me being in a classroom, you were in your classroom, you were seeing

your clocks, sitting in your desks. I didn’t say, “Go sit in a desk,” I didn’t say, “Go visualize a desk or a clock” or “Go be in school,” I

just was telling my experience. But usually, when you tell your experience in a evocative enough way, other people will ride on it. But if you say, “Visualize a classroom,” some people say, “Oh, I

don’t visualize well” or “I’m not doing this right,” so I wanted to make it more of an indirect possibility. One of the ways to offer multiple choice options is telling stories, which we'll be getting into as we go along. AUDIENCE:

Was that just a random selection of stories?

No, it was not a random selection. It was a very purposeful selection of stories. It was somewhat derived from associations, that is, one story would associate to another, but there was a

sequence of suggestions and ideas and possibilities that I was giving. The first set of stories were about going into trance, the second set was about creating changes in perceptions, and the third set of anecdotes had to do with creating changes in muscular movements. Then there were a few others, but that was the sequence as I remember it right now. All right, thank you for being up here, Dennis. What we’ve done this morning is to bring you through the basics of the elements of Ericksonian induction, play you a few examples

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on the tape recorder and hear how different people do it: Erickson, Jeff Zeig, and myself, so far. We’ve also had this live demonstration so you could get a sense of how to put all those elements together. What we'll do this afternoon is start you practicing one little piece of each element of Ericksonian induction at a time. I'll do another demonstration this afternoon. We’ll play a little more audio and videotape this afternoon. We’ll add a little more didactic material mainly on trance phenomenon, hypnotic phenomenon — anesthesia, hand levitation, and things like that—so you can understand why would you ever use those, what they are about, and how you elicit them. We’ll have some practice on that as well. Again, all this is leading towards tomorrow, which will answer the question, “What do you do once you get ’em into trance?” The stuff that we do today is going to be relevant for what we talk about tomorrow, and there are going to be pieces of what we do today that we are going to expand on tomorrow. So, even if you’ve already had a background on Ericksonian hypnosis, don’t worry if some of this is repetition for you. Today we’re building the background for tomorrow’s teaching because the main point is using this stuff in therapy for results. I think inducing a trance is fairly simple, and I think you can learn that fairly quickly. What to do once you get them into trance is a much more complex matter and I think needs much more clarity. So far, I think you’re with me in getting a clearer understanding, I'm seeing enough head nods, and you are laughing in the right places so I have a good sense that you are getting it. This afternoon we are going to ask you to do some work. This is a workshop. The work is doing these exercises but I will make them the least threatening that I can make them. I’m still going to ask you to do some work and to take some risks, okay? Here are a few examples to give you a little more modeling and then I am going to have you start to practice the skills. These are some videotapes that are examples of Erickson’s work from various phases in his career so you can see the differences between his earlier and later styles. This first one is an example of Erickson in 1975 when he was fairly infirm physically, but the tape quality

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is good. It’s a color tape that was made in a television studio. By that time he had really suffered the aftereffects of polio. He couldn’t wear his false teeth anymore, he had to articulate without them because the muscles in his mouth had deteriorated so much that his mouth was uneven. One of his lungs wasn’t working, the right side of his body was essentially paralyzed, part of his tongue was paralyzed, and he prided himself in having a lot of control over his voice and over his movements. This was near the end of his life and he was in a great deal of pain, he was already in a wheelchair. )

Videotape Example #1: Milton Erickson— Induction With Presupposition ERICKSON: Well, Monde, this time I’d like to have you take your time about going into a trance. I don’t want you to go into trance too soon. And you know how easy it is for you. And while Nick is here, I’d like to have you watch Monde’s face. And your unconscious mind will learn a great deal. So turn and look so you can see her. So you hear this? “Now I don’t want you to go into trance too soon, because you know how easy it is for you.” Remember presupposition? She’s been in a trance a couple of times, and that’s pretty much the induction he uses with her, a couple of phrases. She’s seen her husband (Nick) go into trance before with Erickson while she was there and get a hand levitation. Now she has an acquaintance of hers there as well, a different Nick. He’s sitting there watching this, he’s never been in trance before. Erickson is working with both of them. He focuses Nick’s attention.

ERICKSON: Not quite that fast, Monde. Let’s have a little talk first, cause in the trance I will want you to do something of importance for you. And just for you. And just waiting. And you know why I’m waiting for.

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“Not that fast Monde, let’s have a little talk first” implies that something’s going to happen next “because in that trance I want you to do something of importance for you” —that’s linking—doing something of importance for her in the trance. She starts to blink, her facial muscles start to change, her breathing starts to change, and he says, “I’m just waiting and you know why I’m waiting for” —it’s ungrammatical, confusing, what’s he’s waiting for and why, but she responds by starting to go into trance. ERICKSON:

That’s right, that’s right. All the way shut.

He sees her response, and he reinforces it: “All the way shut.” Notice that he didn’t tell her to close her eyes, all he said was, “All the way shut.” Her eyes were halfway closed and then they close all the way. ERICKSON: Now go deeply into trance, so that your unconscious can deal with that vast store of memories that you have. And Id like to have you feel very comfortable. Once he gets a response he’s a lot more directive. Once she closes her eyes at some of the ideas and suggestions, he says, “Now go deeply into trance so that your unconscious can deal with that vast store of memories that you have,” implying that she has a vast store of memories and that something in the trance is going to have to do with that.

Videotape Example #2: Milton Erickson— Induction by Evocation Now this next segment is a lot more challenging, it’s from the late 50s, and Erickson is working with a guy who’s never been in trance before except for a brief experience the night before at a party. It seems that‘Erickson did a brief trance induction with him during the previous evening at a social gathering. They are sitting in the same room where the party has been the night before and there are

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people behind a one-way mirror watching and somebody is in the room recording them for research purposes (I believe Gregory Bateson is running the camera, but it’s unclear).

This guy has never formally been in a trance before, and you hear Erickson first making a little chitchat with him about the one-way mirror and sort of chiding the people behind the mirror about the supposed neutrality of their one-way mirror because Andre Weitzenhoffer lights a cigarette and you can see through the mirror. Erickson’s saying, “I wonder about the one-way mirrors that they use, and I wonder if they realize that you can betray yourself through the one-way mirror.” He’s commenting on the supposed neutrality of their research and realizing that they are having an influence on people by having the one-way mirror. He starts to idly chitchat and then, as he starts to focus in, you can hear his voice change, see his posture change, his demeanor, and what does he do? He initially reorients this guy to the night before where he was talking to him about trance. ERICKSON: I wonder if Andre realizes that you can . . . see that. And I wonder about the experimental work that they do here. Whether they’re aware that they can betray themselves through the one-way mirror. Do you remember the first time we met? SUBJECT:

ERICKSON:

Yes.

You were sitting not quite in that position. I was

over on your left side, isn’t that right? SUBJECT: That’s right. On my right side. that’s right, on your right side. And, let’s ERICKSON: And... see, there’s Hilgard over slightly to the left of the room in the same general relative position where Bateson is right now. SUBJECT:

Uh huh. ERICKSON: And I don’t remember where any of the others were, but they were scattered around and they were rather silent as they listened to what I had to say to you. And one of the things I mentioned to you was this matter of feeling yourself, do you recall? SUBJECT:

Yes, I remember, yes.

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He’s re-evoking the previous evening: “Do you remember the first time we met?” and he makes a mistake, and the guy corrects him, but he keeps re-evoking. ERICKSON: And as you remember that, do you remember just what happened to you as you recalled it? Okay, so he says, “and I mentioned this matter of feeling yourself’? —he tries to stretch out his voice, a little change in his demeanor, and he says, “and as you recall that [linking] do you recall . . . ’—to link one experience to another. ERICKSON: You felt yourself doing what? That’s right, you felt yourself going into a trance as you'll recall; just as you’re going into a trance right now. The guy starts to respond. “You felt yourself doing what?” and the guy starts to flatten out his facial muscles, change his breathing, he gets very immobile. Erickson responds to these changes by saying, “That right, going into a trance. Just as you are going into

a trance right now.” Erickson’s head is nodding in time to his breathing. ERICKSON:

And Id like to have you feel yourself in a different

position.

Again Erickson gets directive once he gets an initial response.

Exercise #1: Induction With Permission

and Splitting I'd like you to do an exercise so you can start to get these skills into your behavior. For these first couple of exercises you don’t have to put people into trance. You’re just going to talk the talk and walk the walk of trance induction. While I say that, though, some people may go into trance as you are doing these exercises—some people may already be experienced.

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There’s going to be one element that will be consistent throughout all the exercises we will do. Now you don’t have to do it in your office in the future, but I’m going to ask that you do it in this setting, and that is, that you speak only when the person exhales. How can you notice when people exhale? If you haven’t been making this distinction, then I suggest that you just watch my shoulders when I breathe. What happens with my shoulders when I inhale and exhale? They go up and down slightly. Or, find some part of their clothing that moves in response to or along with their breathing. Speak only when they are exhaling. Even if it means that you skip a couple of breaths, as long as you come in on the exhale. Even if it means that you break up your sentences and even stop in the middle of a sentence or a phrase. You are going to wait for that exhalation and speak only then and stop as soon as they stop exhaling. That’s the first element and it’s going to be the common element as we add others. The next element for this first exercise is give them permission to experience whatever they are experiencing (feel, think, whatever). Give them basic permission and validation for whatever response that they give. The third element in this first exercise is start to create this conscious/unconscious split. You can do it verbally and nonverbally. What I usually do, and this is a recommendation, is to attribute all the concerns, resistances, and distractions to the conscious mind, and attribute trance to the unconscious mind and automatic

experience to the unconscious mind: “Your conscious mind may be distracted by the sounds around, by the other people talking. Your conscious mind may be wondering whether you can go into a trance.” All the skepticism, all the worries and concerns, I usually attribute to the conscious mind: “And your unconscious mind at the same time can be remembering all the previous trance-like experiences. Your unconscious mind may be sure that you can go into a

trance while your conscious mind may be sure that you can’t go into a trance. Your unconscious mind can be helping you experi-

ence whatever you need to experience in the way that is right for you.” Just start to make the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious minds. Also, I usually attribute to the conscious aspects the external,

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here-and-now focus of attention. When I go over to the unconscious, I talk about any time other than the now time (the past or the future) and I talk about any place other than here. Like Erickson was doing with this guy in the last example, when he said, “I'd like you to feel yourself in a different location,” and he has him remember back to the previous evening, so he does both the distinctions of having the guy go back in time to the previous night and having him change his position as well and feel himself in a different position. You can do all those in addition, if you want, but the main one I want you to get in here is speaking on the exhale, giving the person permission to respond however they do, and make the conscious and unconscious distinction both verbally and nonverbally. Your job in these exercises is to feel awkward, feel as if you can’t do it and make a lot of mistakes. Do you think you can do that? Because the point is if this isn’t your usual way of working in therapy, that has got to be a bit awkward when you start. However, we are going to break it up in little pieces so it gets less awkward as you go along. We are going to give you enough modeling and practice so that by osmosis at the end of the two days, it will be very much less awkward and more comfortable. All right? Just take about five or six minutes and go both ways and switch after about five minutes and have the other person be the talker. One talker, one listener. This isn’t hypnotist and subject, just talkers and listeners at this point. I’ll give you a halfway time signal. (Participants do the exercise.)

Actually, when I go to workshops I hate to do exercises, and I always get value out of doing them. This workshop has a lot of exercises so you will be a lot more confident about using trance in your practice.

Questions or comments, what did you learn by doing that? AUDIENCE:

Is it okay to speak on the inhale all the time?

Sure. If you choose a particular pattern and that works for you, that’s fine as long as you keep it and develop it as an automatic

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pilot pattern. The other thing I can say, though, is if you already have a pattern developed where you do a lot of relaxation training or a lot of guided fantasy or a lot of biofeedback kind of things or autogenic training, please leave that pattern at the door. You can have it back when you leave. I assume you are already good at that. What Id like you to do is get these automatic patterns, and then you can put the two together when you leave. If speaking on the inhale, then, is one of your old patterns, you might develop more flexibility and speak on the exhale, but if speaking on the inhale feels more comfortable for you, and you haven’t had a particular pattern before, fine. AUDIENCE: wondering.

Yeah, I could do it any which way? I was just

No, there’s nothing magical about it. AUDIENCE: When you are talking, you are exhaling, | guess, and it does keep your breathing together. Yes, it does keep your breathing together, but it’s not essential. It’s not essential to speak on that kind of rhythm, but I think it’s nice. The other thing I say is when I ask for hand levitation, I ask for it on the inhale. I use it for that as a specific purpose, and we'll be talking about that later. Okay, so what else? AUDIENCE: I felt very disjointed or uncomfortable. In listening or in talking? AUDIENCE:

In talking.

To acertain extent that’s a function of the exercise, because you haven’t got a lot of content to put in there yet. Also, it’s a little awkward and not your usual way to talk, but as we go along we'll give you more content and it will get easier. You will have a few more examples as well, both audio and videotape demonstrations.

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AUDIENCE: comfortable.

As soon as she closed her eyes, I felt more

Aha. That certainly was true for me when I first started. We are going to have exercises you do where the person keeps their eyes open as they go into trance, but at first for me it was like “close your eyes, I don’t want your fish eyes looking at me while I’m doing this, because I feel a little awkward about this whole thing.” Now sometimes I do trance having the person keep their eyes open. We'll talk about that as we go along and have you do more exercises, again, as you get more comfortable. We'll have some exercises where the person talks as well. For now, though, we are just having you talk to them. AUDIENCE: I just found it a little hard to attend to everything at once. I felt like I needed to be looking at them in the - eyes and then trying to notice when they were breathing. That’s a little difficult sometimes, so usually what I'll do is notice their breathing with my peripheral vision, out of the corner of my eye. I keep that eye contact and I keep my head moving in time with the breathing. So that’s one way to do it, but again, you could not look them in the eye.

Audiotape Example #3: Milton Erickson— Induction With Permission and Splitting Okay, let’s add another example before you do another exercise. This is the first time the guy’s been in trance, he’s learning about hypnosis. He’s a photographer who has an artistic block. You can hear the conscious/ unconscious dissociation and presumably it will be more meaningful now that you’ve just done it. Even though you may be intensely interested consciously, I would like to have you appreciate the fact that you are infinitely more interested at an unconscious level. And consciously you can just relax; you can close your eyes and let your mind wander at will, from my words, to thoughts of

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photography, to thoughts of Dr. Herschman, to thoughts of the weather, to thoughts of your daily work, to thoughts of what you had for breakfast today—any wandering thought that comes to your mind. There should be no effort on your part to try to listen to me, no effort whatsoever. Just as you watch a flower open, you can sit and watch it without making any effort of your own. In exactly the same way, you can let your unconscious mind open and do its own thinking, its own feeling, without any effort whatsoever on your part. All you need to know is that your unconscious mind does exist; it is within you. It is a part of you that you do not really know and never really will know, but which knows a tremendous amount about you. Okay, now that you’ve actually done that exercise, you can hear that Erickson was making the conscious and unconscious dissociation. He was also giving a lot of permission for distraction, for wandering thoughts, and he was attributing some things to the conscious mind and other things to the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind, he was implying, has a lot of knowledge and a lot of power and the conscious mind has only a limited sort of power. Now go back to the Using Presupposition in Hypnosis handout (1.2, p. 18). That will help you in the next exercise.

Now to the next piece. The next piece is the use of presupposition. You’ve got this handout as a guide. I'd like you to have some experience using presupposition in trance induction.

Again, the

first step is the same as before—speak on the exhale. Next, imply or presuppose that the person is going to go into trance. Or, after you see some response, presume that they have gone into trance. Then, the third step in this exercise is to speculate aloud with them about the varied experience they could have while going into trance. The key here is never to doubt that they are going to go into trance, only to speculate about all the ways that they could accomplish that. They might be distracted, their conscious mind might not believe they are going into trance, as they are going into trance. You can use this sheet of ways to presuppose as your cheat

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sheet. You can have it on your lap and look at it and say, “Would you like to go into trance now or later?” rotely following it, or you can get a little more creative by looking down at this and making up new sentences, new questions. You can use this technique using

questions or statements, so it might be, “Would you like to go into trance with your eyes open or your eyes closed?” or it might be the statement, “Some people like to go into trance with their eyes open, some people like to go into trance with their eyes closed. I really don’t know which would be most comfortable for you or which you would like.” The latter is a statement rather than a question. You are going to imply and presuppose the person’s going into

trance, never doubt that, Erickson’s got that handled, he’s behind you, I’ve got that handled, I’m behind you, we are going to put the person into trance, you don’t have to worry about it, it’s going to happen. All you are going to have to do is speculate aloud to them on the process of going into trance, what they'll be aware of, what they will experience and how they’ll go into trance. Never question the idea that they are going to go into trance. Does that make sense? All right. Again, one talker, one listener and switch places halfway. Again, they don’t have to go into trance, but you are just going to talk about going into trance. The next exercise will be about having them go into trance. We are learning to talk this kind of talk and put some of these skills together. You can use whatever you used in the last exercise. You can do the conscious/unconscious dissociation if you want, give them permission, whatever

else you want, that’s fine as long as you get these new pieces in. Let me give you a couple of examples before you go. I’m just going to ask Glenn, “Have you ever been in trance before” —that’s going to be my first presupposition. Now, “Would you like to go into trance with your glasses on or would you like to take your glasses off to go into trance?” Then, “As you take your glasses off, would you like to close your eyes to go into trance, or would you like to keep your eyes open while you are going into trance?” Close your eyes? Okay, “You can do that now” (remember permission from the exercise before). “And as you close your eyes, I wonder how quickly you'll realize that you’re going into trance? I wonder what the first sign that you see will be, or the first sign that you feel will be that you are going into trance? And I really don’t know

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how deeply you are going into trance, or how profoundly you are going into trance. I do know that you could have a lot of experiences while you are in trance and that they should be personal experiences for you, not particularly anybody else’s experience, but your Own experience, at your own rate and at your own pace. So don’t go in any more deeply than is appropriate for you. And I really don’t know how deeply that is, but I do know that you could have your own trance and experience that in a way that is right for you.” Okay, that’s fine. Thanks, Glenn. Just speculate about what kind of trance he’s going to experience, never question that he’s going to have a trance experience.

This exercise doesn’t have to take too long. Again, because the point for this exercise is not particularly to get the person into trance, but just for you to learn to talk the talk with the person right in front of you responding. Okay, five or six minutes apiece, first as a talker and then as a listener. Just to reduce your anxiety level I won’t be listening to you now, but during the next few exercises I'll be around to coach, and we'll do some other public exercises as well. (The participants do the exercise.) Start to finish up and come back into the big group. All right, what questions or comments did you have and what learning did you have there? AUDIENCE: I’m having difficulty being with my own breathing and his breathing, too. Okay, so you had difficulty noticing his breathing and speaking or paying attention to both at the same time or what? AUDIENCE: I guess just paying attention. I’m not sure.

Okay, well I think if you are having trouble paying attention both at the same time, just go in and out of one and the other. times pay attention to the breathing and at times pay attention what you are saying, and after a while you'll learn to do both

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the same time. It’s like riding a bicycle or driving a car at first, you're supposed to look in the rearview mirror, put your hands on the wheel, put the clutch in, put the gas on, and switch gears. It’s pretty overwhelming to do all those things at once, so once you get one of them on automatic pilot, you can usually do several of them at the same time. At first driving was pretty overwhelming and now most people can do it in their sleep and as far as I can tell, they do drive in their sleep. (Laughter) At first you couldn’t do that, you were real tense and nervous and didn’t think you’d ever get this and feel comfortable doing it. But obviously after a while, you got comfortable doing it. Okay? What else? AUDIENCE: One thing that I noticed is, as the listener, I don’t hear half of what he says, I mean I’m much more with... It’s too bad, I eavesdropped, and what he was saying was very profound. (Laughter) AUDIENCE:

My unconscious heard it. (Laughter)

Yeah. I’ve had lots of clients tell me that, and I kid them and

say, “I said really profound things and you weren’t listening to that?!” Sometimes they just ride on the rhythm of my voice and use the voice as sort of an anchor. They just go away, but link to the voice and that’s how they’ll know they are supposed to come out. Sometimes they tune in and out of it. This is a very common experience, so obviously it’s not just the content of your words that is creating the trance. Maybe you can relax a little about that. After my wife Pat had our baby, she got real real tired. She would do trance with clients and she would occasionally start to fall asleep while she was hypnotizing clients. When she falls asleep while doing hypnosis, she sometimes starts saying totally nonsensical things from images out of her dreams. She said her clients never noticed. She would then wake up and hear what she had just said, and she would try to weave it in in some creative way, but they never really seemed to notice that she was talking this totally nonsensical talk. Maybe that will relax you a bit about the content. What else?

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AUDIENCE: Sometimes while doing this I’m trying to imply that he is going to go into trance this way or that way, and he was already into trance. Then I might say something ambiguous like, “As you’re going into a trance. . . . ” Now that’s not really clearly saying they actually are now or whether it’s going to be in the future. “As you are going into trance, you might notice the changes in breathing, the changes in blood pressure. . . . ” AUDIENCE:

How do you know that they really are in a

trance, and you can say, “Now that youareinatrance...”?

I watch for common trance indicators. I’ve given you a list: flattening of facial muscles change in skin color immobility decrease in orienting movements

catalepsy in a limb changes in blinking and swallowing altered breathing and pulse autonomous motor behavior (jerkiness)

faraway look fixed gaze changed voice quality time lag in response perseveration of response literalism dissociation relaxed muscles

Find the common trance indicators. Look for a few of these puppies. I would never make it as precise as three out of five or

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anything, but typically, these are the responses one sees when the person goes into trance.

AUDIENCE:

What do you usually see?

What did you see when Dennis came up here that Dennis did differently from the kind of conversations that we usually have with Dennis? First, he doesn’t usually close his eyes during a conversation. Sometimes he does, perhaps, but not for that long. So he closed his eyes, and he was breathing in a different way than he usually breathes, his breathing changed. He flattened his facial muscles. If you could see it, he had a slight change in his skin —he wasn’t moving a great deal. color. He showed immobility In this conversation we are having now, most of you are fidget-

ing around a little, but as soon as we start to have a trance conversation, for some reason, people slow way down and stop moving for the most part. And when they do move, they show that autonomous motor behavior, the jerkiness. They’re what’s called ideomotor movements in trance, sometimes you can see these little jerky finger movements. Some hypnotists use automatic finger movements as “yes” and “no” signals. In trance, your fingers show a sort of jerky movement. | We also saw changes in blinking and swallowing and catalepsy in a limb. Try to hold your hand up like this for about half an hour or 45 minutes and you'll find that it’s very difficult to do it, it gets real heavy or painful or whatever. But Dennis probably had the sense, maybe he didn’t, but most people have the sense that their hand is on its own and could stay up there for 15 or 20 minutes, half an hour, even 45 minutes. If you hold it up that long while you’re out of trance, after a while it hurts. In trance it doesn’t seem to require any effort or hurt. That waxy catatonia you have heard about in psychopathology where you put the person in certain body postures and they stay in that posture is similar. A far away look if their eyes are open, they just sort of stare at one thing and don’t. move a lot, their eyes are fixed. They have a changed voice quality if they talk and sometimes there’s a time lag in their responses, both verbal and nonverbal. Dennis had to wait, I had to wait to see his hand levitation after I invited it. It took a little

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while. Sometimes you'll ask a question, and you’ll think the person didn’t hear it, and then they'll answer. It just takes a little while. Also, perseveration of response. Sometimes when you see people nodding in trance, they’ll just keep nodding for a long time. Literalism—this is when people really respond exactly very literally, like we used to have this deal when we were learning some of these language skills in our house, and we’d say, “Could you get me a beer?” and the person would say “yes” and wouldn’t move. Yeah, I can, it’s a possibility. I rarely have literalism from trance, but occasionally. I remember one person with whom I was doing a trance demonstration in Oxford, England. It was this guy’s first time ever in trance. He went into trance, got the arm/hand levitation, lifted it up to his face. Up it went and touched his face. When I wanted him to come out of trance, I said, “and your hand could drift back down to your thigh and as it touches your leg or your thigh you can come all the way out of trance.” So down it comes, finally his fingers and hand touch his leg and he opens his eyes, seemingly he comes out of trance, and his hand is touching his leg, but his arm is stuck up in the air. So he looks at me, and I said, “Hello,” and he said,

“You know, it’s weird; my arm just sort of feels sort of stuck here and suspended.” I said, “Okay.” And he said, “Well, will my arm

ever go down?” and I said, “I assume it will eventually.” He said, “Well, when?” and I said, “I don’t really know,” and he asked, “Why didn’t it go all the way down when I came out of trance?” I said, “I don’t really know.” So I said, “Okay, close your eyes and go all the way back into trance.” He closed his eyes, went all the way back into trance, and I said, “Now Pll ask your unconscious,

why didn’t your hand and arm go all the way down?” He replied, “Because you only told my hand to go back down to my thigh.” So I said, “Picky, picky, picky. Okay, the hand and the arm can lift all the way up again and the hand and the hand and arm can go all the back down when you come out of trance.” And that was that. They both came down and out he came. But usually you don’t get such literalism. Dissociation is the splitting we talked about, of the person’s body from their head. Dissociation of their emotions. Erickson would occasionally have a person remember the humor of their

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favorite joke and not the intellectual content of it, so they would be laughing and laughing and have no idea what they were laughing about—that’s dissociation. Dissociation of emotion from intellect. Dissociation of one part of your body from another part of your body. Dissociation of the conscious from the unconscious mind; any split in your experience that’s intense enough for you to notice it. That’s usually related to trance. There is not a requirement for any of these things, but these are some of the things to look for. What I can say is just notice during the next two days when people go into trance, what they do and, all of a sudden, you'll start to get it. More than that, notice what happens for you when you go into trance, and you'll start to get it. A guy came to Erickson and wanted him to define trance, and Erickson wouldn’t define it. The guy returned every day and asked Erickson to define trance. Erickson told him he’d only know it by experiencing it. The guy’s frustrated and keeps asking Erickson every day, what’s trance, what’s trance? And Erickson’s reply is always, “You'll only know it by experiencing it.” He goes out to eat with Erickson, and Erickson’s wife pleads with him to tell the guy what trance is because he’s making the dinner miserable by his pleading. So Erickson says, “You'll know it when you experience it,” and the guy experiences it sometime during the week, and it answers his question. You'll probably have a lot of questions until you figure out “Oh, this is trance, I get it,” and that’s an internal experience. You will also see so many examples of it when you do your exercises, you'll start to say, “I get it—they are in trance.”

Exercise #2: Using Analogies and Anecdotes to Induce Trance Now I want you to do one more exercise before the break and that is evoking trance by analogy and anecdote. I think there are really four aspects of trance, four doorways into trance. One of the doorways is spacing out or de-focusing. And there are common, everyday, universal sort of experiences that one could talk about that are common experiences of spacing out or defocusing. Lying on the grass looking at the clouds. The hypnogogic state, which is when you are just about but not quite asleep state,

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TRANCEPORTS: THE FOUR DOORWAYS INTO TRANCE Spacing Out/De-focusing lying on the grass looking at the clouds hypnogogic/hypnopompic states meditating/relaxation states listening to a boring class/lecture Absorption/focused awareness involved in a movie/television/book

listening to a riveting speaker absorbed in music

absorbed in some activity or work absorbed in a conversation

Dissociation/splitting of awareness and/or activity playing an instrument (once you’ve mastered it) playing a sport (once you’ve mastered it) doodling eating popcorn in the movies Rhythmic/pattern/repetitive behavior chanting dancing mantras running rocking

and the hypnopompic state, which is the state between sleeping and waking up. Meditating and relaxation states. Listening to a boring class or lecture. Times in natural everyday life when you space out into trance-like states. It’s not a formal hypnotic trance but it’s trance-like. So that’s one of the doorways: spacing out and de-focusing. Not focusing on anything. Sort of spreading your light wide. The opposite of that is also a characteristic typical of trance and that is narrowing the spotlight. The beam of attention is very narrow, like the absorption or focus awareness involved in a movie, television, or book; or listening to a riveting speaker, somebody who really captures your attention; or being absorbed in music.

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Sometimes I listen to music and, because I’m a musician, I listen to

just one instrument throughout the whole piece of music. I will just, for example, listen to the bass. The rest fades into the background. I’m so absorbed in that—that’s a trance. Being absorbed in some activity or work, when you are really into it. Frederick and I were talking about that during one of the breaks. He said, “I think I go into trance sometimes when I do therapy.” I said, “You mean, when you are really into it?” and he says, “Yeah, when it’s really going smoothly and flowing.” Being absorbed in a conversation. Ever have the experience of eating in a restaurant and having dinner with friends of yours and, all of a sudden, you look up and all the waiters and waitresses and the owner are waiting for you to leave? Now for those of you who are nodding, you probably evoked a little of that experience just by me reminding you. That’s a common everyday experience of absorption or focus awareness. Now the next doorway is dissociation or splitting of awareness and activity. For example, once you’ve mastered playing an instrument, you can play it without really thinking about it a lot. If you play the flute, after a while, it just plays itself. You just are sort of there and intending to play something. Sometimes when I play guitar people say, “You are really a good guitar player,” and I say, “No, my fingers are, though.” By now, I don’t know how to play the guitar anymore, but my fingers know really well. If I try to think about it I just get in my own way. This is true of very complicated things especially. Once you’ve mastered an instrument, if you play it, you are usually doing it in a dissociated way. Playing a sport—same thing. Doing therapy, once you’ve mastered it. Doing hypnosis, once you’ve mastered it. You are on automatic pilot and you don’t have to think about it. Doodling—a common everyday experience. You are on the phone and you don’t even notice what you doodle, you are just doing it. Eating popcorn in the movies, and when your hand hits the bottom you wonder, “Who ate that popcorn?” That’s dissociation. Maybe people eat in a dissociated way and don’t even recognize what they ate or that they eat, they just eat. Rhythmic or patterned behavior is the last doorway into trance that I’ve specified here. That is repeating something in a very rhythmic way, running, rocking, saying mantras, whatever it may be.

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Dancing for some people, chanting, those things can be common everyday trance experience. Some people use chanting or mantras to develop a meditation-type trance. Now these (defocusing, narrowing the spotlight, dissociation, and rhythmic or patterned behavior) are the doorways to trance and you can use common universal experiences that can evoke trance-like experiences. Remember when I was talking about linking earlier. With people, especially those who have never been in trance before, evoke a bunch of trance-like experiences and say, “Now put all those together and this is trance.” Grab de-focusing. Grab an experience of focused attention. Grab an experience of dissociation. Grab an experience of rhythmic experience. Here in the front row, you just came back from a trance, welcome back. A common everyday one where you are zoned out for a little while, off in your own experience and then I notice you reorient to your body. You’re gone from here for a moment. And I was saying really important stuff, too. (Laughter) No, not really. It was all fluff while you were gone. So, what I’d like you to do for the next exercise before we take a break is to use one of these four doorways or all of the doorways to invite the person into trance, by telling them a bunch of stories about your (and potentially their) experience. So that could be examples of common, everyday trance, and then invite them to use those to go into trance. Again, speak on the exhalation. A second way is to interview the person for any of these common, everyday trance experiences— what ones they have had. Did they play an instrument? Trance-like experiences that are in their experience and background. A third way is to use the experiences they have or universal experiences—ones that most people would have—to evoke trance. Do that by telling stories and using novelistic detail to evoke a memory of those trance-like experiences. Now what I mean by novelistic detail is that, just like a novelist, you try to make the experience come alive for the person. Instead of saying, “The man was sitting in his study,” you say, “He was sitting in his study; it was a cold and dark night. He could see the lightning flash every once in a while that illuminated the yard. He could hear the rain against the window pane. He could feel the warmth of the fire against his back. He could hear the scratching

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of the pen in the quiet of the night between the thunder claps and lightning. He could smell the wood smoke.” Now, you’ve just talked about all the sensory experiences that a person could have in that experience and you’ve made it a little more novelistic than “sitting in his study, writing.” The person can ride on those sensory experiences and get involved in the experience. That’s what Garrison Keillor, of Prairie Home Companion fame, does—gives you enough novelistic detail to evoke, but not too much so that it imposes on your experience. So, give them enough sensory details. Make it alive. That’s what I’m learning about writing and teaching. I tell you the general principle, the abstract principle, and then I tell you a story. The story about Pat falling asleep, saying something nonsensical and her clients not noticing, brings the principle of it not mattering exactly what you say during induction alive for you a little. In the same way, what you are going to do is help bring trance alive in the person’s experience rather than just telling them about trance. This time I’d like you to do it only one way and take about ten minutes. One talker/one listener. Before you begin, interview them to find out what common trance experiences they have had. Then do a trance. And be anxious when I come around, okay? Be a little nervous and feel awkward. I'll give you a couple of minutes to get started. (Participants do the exercise.) All right, what did you experience? What did you learn? AUDIENCE:

It’s getting easier.

How so? AUDIENCE: Some things I didn’t have to think about a whole lot, like the breathing. Watching the breathing is a bit more automatic. Did anyone else feel that about the breathing? I was coaching some people on that as I walked around. What I coached Henry on was the idea of not having to speak on every breath, because his

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partner Frederick’s breathing was fairly rapid. So I'd just speak on every other breath or every third breath. That would slow me down a little. Right now, it seems like a fairly rapid pace for you, so to be able to think about stuff between talking when first learning this is a good thing and also to slow you down a little more and slow him down a little more. What else? AUDIENCE: I felt real comfortable and relaxed, except I could see myself in a recliner or another chair being a lot more relaxed. Some people could do it in a sit up chair, | know, but also to add to their experience another chair would be better. Yes, and I say by the end of this workshop that a lot of your trance will be linked to these straight back chairs and maybe it may be a little harder to do it laying down at that point, because you will have linked so many trances to these chairs. But a recliner may help some people.

AUDIENCE: I’m a lot more comfortable going into trance than being the one to induce it. (Laughter)

Aha, a trance junkie from way back. It takes one to know one, and I’m one so I know. Someone invites me to go into trance and,

boom, I’m gone. I find, though, that some people find it a little difficult to get into trance, like there is some struggle going on, a conflict, a lot of mind chatter or whatever. When they do get into trance, though, and I say, “Okay, come out of trance,” they say, “Forget you—goodbye, I’m having a great time, I don’t want to come back.”

AUDIENCE: One of the things that I noticed as the listener was it really didn’t matter what stories Glenn told, ’cause I made up my own. I was really much more aware of what my own experiences were. That’s generally true with Glenn. He tends to just waffle on,

and whatever it is he’s talking about, that’s Glenn, but with other

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people you'll find that the stories are actually profound. (Laughter) Always there with support, right, Glenn? Giving you that basic necessary support, trying to make the learning experience as un-

threatening as possible. Someone asked, “How do you get competent in trance?” and I say, “The same way you get to Carnegie Hall—practice, practice, practice.” These people know you are not an expert yet, who’re you trying to fool, right? So just go for it. I’ve heard people doing that as I’ve been going around, so that’s pretty good. Good stuff.

THREE

Trance Phenomena: Getting Your Hands on the Control Knob of Experience

\X/HAT WE ARE HEADING INTO this afternoon is a focus on trance phenomena. When hypnosis was first delineated and discovered, in the time of mesmerism, animal magnetism, people found that some subjects that were in trance would spontaneously do some of these trance phenomena: amnesia— forgetting some specific thing or forgetting being in trance or forgetting their identity time distortion (contraction or expansion) age progression—projecting into the future or seeing them-

selves in the future age regression— going back into the past anesthesia —lack of sensation altogether analgesia —lack of pain.

Early hypnosis investigators found that some or all of these phenomena happened spontaneously for people while in trance. The handout (3.1) delineates the various trance phenomena. After a while hypnotists tried to deliberately elicit the trance phenomena as evidence that the person was in trance (this is called ratification) or to get the person deeply absorbed in trance and

ae

SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS Handout 3.1

TRANCE PHENOMENA MODALITY

+

PERCEPTUAL External sensory perception internal senstations Orientation in space

Positive hallucination V/IAIT/G/O New/different sensations Reorientation

Negative hallucination VIAIT/G/O

Analgesia/ anesthesia Disorientation

MEMORY Memory Orientation in time Time flow

Hyperamnesia Age progression ‘Expansion

Age regression

Levitation/

Catalepsy

Amnesia Contraction

BODY/ PHYSIOLOGY Muscle movements

Autom. writing/ Heart/blood Temperature

ideomotor Increased heart rate/ blood flow Warmth/heat

Decreased heart rate/blood flow Cool/cold

AFFECT/ ASSOCIATIONS Association Affect

New Associations

New feelings

Dissociation Losing old feelings

deeper into trance. They were used as deliberate mechanisms for deepening absorption and for ratification. They were used to convince you and the subject that they were in trance. Some of you still have the question, “How do I know that they are in trance and not just sitting there with their eyes closed, breathing?” One of the ways to find out is if you’ve got responsiveness. If the person actually is responding, that’s one way to test, if you will, that they are in trance—not the only way, but if they are showing responses to

TRANCE PHENOMENA

‘

We

what you are saying. So trance phenomena are either internal, subjective sort of experiences or externally observable experiences. They are experiences or behaviors that one can use to check trance and also to get people more deeply involved in trance. I think one of the things that made Erickson a very hopeful therapist, an optimistic therapist, was that early on he learned hypnosis. What makes you optimistic when you learn hypnosis is you can recognize how people can get their hand on the control knob of experience. I say, “Make your hand numb,” and you say, “I don’t know how to do that.” But if I go through the rigmarole of doing hypnosis and guide you internally, you could make your hand numb. It’s nothing you know how to do consciously and deliberately, but it is something that is a possibility for you. So, for some reason, when we put you in trance, you or I could get your hands on the control knob of experience, and I can help you make your hand heat up or cool down or go numb. Most of us consider our internal experiences as fairly fixed—we feel the way we feel, we sense the way we sense and this is the way it is. For most of us, our physiological processes are pretty much the way they are. In trance, you could put a person in trance, do some dental procedure with them, tell them to bleed a little to clean out the wound and then stop bleeding, and they can do it. Now why and how is that? I don’t have a clue, to tell you the truth. All I know

is that it seems to work.

That is, for some

reason, with

hypnosis (and there are other ways you could do it, too, hypnosis is just a good way to do it) you can get your hand on the control knob of experience. Erickson learned that early on; he learned that people are pretty changeable. Instead of learning these fixed personality theories that most of us learned to do psychotherapy, he learned a change theory. He learned a change technique as well. So he started to explore with people how much they could change

their experience of time, of space, of sensation, of their sense of

where they were in time, age regression or age progression. So I’ve delineated trance phenomena for you in three columns: (see Handout 3.1, p. 78): the left hand column is the person’s experience—the modality of human experience or behavior, but usually an internal experience. In the middle column, a plus sign indicates that you are either amplifying or turning up the volume

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on that particular experience. There is positive hallucination, in which you have a person see something, hear something, touch something, taste something, or smell something that isn’t there (Visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory). A positive hallucination, then, is something that they see, hear, feel, taste, or

smell that isn’t really there, but that you add to their sensory experience. Just as you can enhance or amplify, you can turn the volume or intensity down on any of those senses. That would be a negative hallucination. Negative hallucination is dropping something out of your experience or diminishing it in your experience. Negative

hallucination is when you don’t notice something that is in your sensory field. If you think this is kind of weird stuff, just think about it in terms of everyday life experiences. Some of you may have had the experience of walking around in a crowd and thinking you’ve heard somebody call you name and turning around and you’ve found that nobody called your name. Ever had that experience? Then you are either psychotic, or you have had a common, everyday experience of positive hallucination. Many people have had that kind of experience. Maybe you’ve been in bed and thought you felt a bug but it was just the sheets moving. That’s positive hallucination. Adding something to your sensory field that wasn’t there. Maybe you’ve been around somebody who was kind of dirty and you started to itch a lot. AUDIENCE:

Talking about head lice.

Right. Someone talks about head lice and you start to feel all sorts of feelings on your head. Even though logically you know you haven’t got lice, you start to get freaked. That’s positive hallucination. How about some common, everyday experiences involving negative hallucination? For those of you who wear glasses, you probably noticed your glasses right when you first got them and then you don‘’t notice them after a couple of days or weeks. It’s embarrassing for me because sometimes I look for my glasses when they are on my face. That’s really bad. You’ve dropped something out

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of your experience. Some people wear watches, wear rings, and they don’t notice them after a while if they wear them a lot. I used to be a hippie, so when I first learned to tie a tie to go out and teach workshops, it was like, how do people wear these things? Now I'll get on a plane and get all the way home before I notice I still have my tie on. Negative hallucination. Dropping something out. You can go all the way down the list, either adding new and different sensations, or dropping some sensations out. Like orientation in space—you can either reorient the person as Erickson was doing with that guy on the tape: “I'd like you to feel yourself in a different position in the room.” Or disorientation—not knowing where you are or where some part of your body is in space. Sometimes during hand or arm levitation, people don’t know where their arms are, not a clue, they just know the arm is somewhere between their leg and their face. The same thing about memory or time. You can either orient to the future—age progression, turning up the volume, or orient back to the past—age regression, turning down or back the volume. Hyperamnesia is remembering something you haven’t remembered very vividly or remembering something you haven’t remembered at all—turning up the volume. Amnesia— turning down the volume and not remembering something. Time flow/time expansion, stretching time out subjectively or time condensation or contraction—volume knob down. You can either add automatic movements, automatic handwriting or hand/arm levitation and that ideomotor movement I talked about earlier—the “yes” signals from the fingers; or drop out movement —catalepsy or immobility. Increase heart rate or blood flow, decrease heart rate or blood flow. Add warmth or heat or subtract warmth or heat making it cool or cold. You can add new associations, new linkages or help the person dissociate. In affect we can add new feelings or help diminish the intensity of old feelings or lose old feelings. This is a list of typical things we do in trance, it doesn’t cover everything, but it’s a pretty good list. What I want to do now is show you some of these trance phenomena in a demonstration. So three people up here who would like to go into trance—you could have been in trance before or not, either way.

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Demonstration #2:

Eliciting Trance Phenomena BILL: Okay, the question I have for each of you is, have you ever been in one of these formal kind of trances before today? SUBJECT 1: Sort of, there was someone in my office being put into a trance, and I was there also. I sort of did but I wasn’t the

subject. SUBJECT 2: No, never before today. SUBJECT 3: No, never before today. BILL: Great, all right. Any questions or comments before you go into trance or particular things you’d liked to do something with while you are in trance, or do you just want to have a profound and interesting experience, or what? You’ll take a profound and interesting experience. Okay. Any particular things you’d like to do? Just curious about it? Okay, good. Those of you who wear glasses are welcome to take them off and we'll find a safe place for them or you can put them under the chair or whatever. Okay, good. So I guess the best way to start is to close your eyes now. If you don’t want to close your eyes, you can keep ’em open, but I might suggest that you find a place to look at on the rug, for example, that might be comfortable for you and just let yourself be exactly the way you are. As I said before, there is nothing particular for you to do to go into trance . . . no right way or wrong way to go into trance. You can just let yourself consciously be thinking what you are thinking and really not particularly trying to make yourself go into trance, ’cause trance is really not a doing, it’s more of a not doing . . . more of an allowing. . . . Trance is like going to sleep in that way ’cause it’s more of an allowing of sleep to be there rather than making yourself go to sleep. . . . So, consciously, you can let whatever enters your consciousness be there. It could be the distractions or the sounds around, it could be the distraction

of knowing that you are sitting up here in front of a group and initially you ‘could be very aware of those things, or you might be attending to your thoughts, wondering whether they are going to go into a trance and what it would be like to go into a trance . . .

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and maybe you’ll be wondering how you'll know when you are in a trance . . . so you can just let those thoughts, that wondering on be there and make sure that you take care of yourself in whatever way is appropriate as you go into trance. And that you don’t go into trance any deeper than is appropriate for you, right here and right now, or don’t go into a trance any way that doesn’t seem appropriate, right here in front of a group. . . . So you don’t really have to do anything to go into a trance. . . . You can just allow yourself to have whatever experience you are going to have. It’s my job to create the climate for you to go into trance. . . and to be able to include whatever needs to be included. . . in order to

facilitate you going into trance. Now much of the time people find they relax when they go into trance, but it’s not really necessary for you to relax when you go into trance . . . because it certainly isn’t universal. There was a psychologist at Stanford, Jack Hilgard, who did an experiment some years ago to debunk the idea that relaxation is hypnosis, and he had people ride exercycles and go into trance . . . and experience various trance phenomena . . . like amnesia, anesthesia, hand and arm levitation. Even though they were showing all the signs of physiological arousal from riding the exercycle, while the induction was going on. So you can have muscle tension and you can pay attention to that tension and you can be comfortable knowing that you can go into trance with that tension being there . . . that it isn’t something you need to work on to let go of .. . or to work on to relax . . . that your trance could be involved with any muscle tension that you have or could be involved with a combination of tension and relaxation... and that’s your particular trance. That although trance is usually typified by a sense of slowing down the heart rate, the breathing, again, it’s not universal and it would be a good thing to know that sometimes your heart rate may speed up and sometimes your blood pressure may elevate, sometimes you may be so focused on whether you are going into trance or not that your attention is just .. . all

caught up in that and that you find that you haven’t relaxed, haven’t slowed down, haven’t found that sense inside of stillness .. of peace . . . of going into trance. And how will you know when you are in a trance, will it be when your perceptions start to change? Your eyes may be open and a change in your vision. . .

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you may develop tunnel vision . . . little auras . . . some other alteration in your vision, if your eyes are closed you may experience

some other change in your visual perception . . . maybe colors . . . maybe something else altogether . . . maybe a change in the muscles in your eyes . . . maybe a change in your sense of where you are... . right now . . . you may be sure that you’re not going into a trance consciously . .. and you may be concerned consciously that you won’t go into a trance . . . just let that concern be there . and let yourself just draw on the background of learnings and don’t trust yourself to go into trance too soon too quickly because you can in your own way have the sense to really determine if this is a trustworthy situation, one in which you want to go into a trance . . . one in which you are willing to go into a trance... and figuring out what you are willing to experience . . . so remember again, to validate yourself for however you are responding, because your response is your response... and that you consciously may be thinking that you are having some response and you may only be aware at the unconscious level of other responses that you are having .. . for example you may not have noticed any alterations in the muscles, you may not have noticed any alterations in your sense of attachment to the hands and the arms. The hands and the arms could become detached in your experience, could in their own way, develop a trance or mind of their own . earlier you saw someone have an experience of that hand movement, that arm movement . . . I remember Jay Haley talking about going to a workshop with Milton Erickson, and Erickson asked for a volunteer and Haley . . . was surprised to find that his leg was automatically twitching and almost pulling him out of the chair . . . and the person just in front of him stood up just about as he was to stand up or he would have come up for a demonstration. So consciously he wouldn’t have thought that he wanted to volunteer but there was something compelling about the invitation . . and obviously his body wanted to volunteer. His unconscious mind wanted to. So how will you know when you are in that trance? Will it be some kind of alteration like that in your muscular experience? As you saw earlier, a sense of the alteration of the hands and the arms, a sense of dissociation . . . from the hands

and the arms .. . it might be that you start to feel little twitches in

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the muscles in your upper arm. It might be that you feel your heart pounding and that becomes central to your awareness and then as you go along, that heart rate could slow down—automatically . . . might be you feel changes in your forearm or your wrist and consciously you might be noticing some conflict about that and resisting it and that’s okay, you can let that resistance be there. Unconsciously, you may find yourself already starting to respond, and that response would just on its own. . . because the unconscious could use that muscle tension . . . and turn it into movement if that is what it wants to do. For me it feels as if there is a force pushing underneath my, palm . . . pushing the hand and arm up . . a little at a time . . . and your conscious mind really doesn’t know which hand lifts first, it may be that they lift together . . . maybe that . . . it doesn’t lift all the way to your face or they don’t lift all the way to your face ...so you can experience that in whatever way is appropriate for you. And when I first started doing trance, I don’t really know how I developed the habit . . . but somehow I started doing trance with my hands in my pockets and I could tell that I was deeply in trance when I couldn’t feel my hands any more and I had a pretty good idea that the other person was in a trance as well at that point . . . so if your unconscious wants to . .. one of those hands could start to... on its own... in its own way lift up off the thigh, the arm could lift off the thigh . . . or both of the arms could lift up together or alone . . . and you could just follow that movement as it does... or what might happen instead or in addition . . . is one or both of those hands might go numb . . . or you could lose time or gain time. . . . I was working with a man who had phobias, he was a therapist . . . he was quite ashamed that he had phobias, that if his clients knew they wouldn’t come to see him. He was ashamed of those and felt really inadequate. I told him I thought it was a generic therapist problem that whenever we had problems we begin to doubt ourselves. That we are entitled to problems just like everybody else. And one time he went into trance he had a double hand levitation, both hands up in the air, and I happened to mention, because I knew he had a good sense of humor, the idea of remembering the humor of your favorite joke without the intellectual content and then I told him a joke that I had heard recently. It was a woman

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who had a fear of needles, phobia of needles went to see her doctor, and she said, “Doctor I have a fear of needles, do you think acu-—

puncture would help?” It was a joke that maybe could use a chuckle or two, but immediately he started laughing hysterically, disturbing the other clients in the other offices. I told him he shouldn’t laugh so hard because otherwise I’d put all my clients in trances and tell them silly jokes, and he shouldn’t reinforce me in that way. But he just kept laughing harder and harder and he laughed so much, that tears started to flow from his eyes, and I told him it reminded me of a Joni Mitchell song: “one minute she’s so happy then she’s crying on someone’s knee, you know laughing and crying it’s the same release,” and he started to cry at the same time and he was laughing and then he started to cry profoundly and he was still laughing. “It felt so strange,” he told me later . . . “to be laughing and crying at the same time.” To have his hands up in the air but to be fully with himself at the same time. To be tense and relaxed at the same time. To be here and there at the same time . . . to be in trance and out of trance at the same time and it was a very profound and integrated experience for him to both be helping people’s problems, be having problems himself and to be able to integrate those rather than have them be two separate worlds. When he got over his phobias, he said that he felt normal. I didn’t like the word normal. I told him I didn’t have any aspirations for him to be normal or for me to normal. He finally explained to me that he really meant adequate. I told him I was glad he felt adequate—that that’s the way I had always seen him. As adequate and okay —even when he didn’t see himself that way. It’s interesting to know that you can direct your experience, and I would like to give you an opportunity to direct your experience wherever you would like to do, and I would like to give one of you an interesting opportunity, when I touch your knee, to have you come out of trance from the neck up and to stay in trance from the neck down, and I’ll ask you a question or two and you can have an opportunity to say whatever it is you would like to say about your experience... Wayne, you can open your eyes and come out from the neck up and tell me what you’re experiencing now and what you've been

experiencing.

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WAYNE: My hands are numb and there was a time I wanted to cry but didn’t... BILL: Anything else?

WAYNE:

No.

BILL: Okay, you can close your eyes and go all the way back into your trance. And if you need to, if you want to, you can have the numbness transfer to anywhere you might need it, to your knee or anyplace else, to eliminate all the unnecessary discomfort and still give you enough sensation to be able to . . . know to take care of yourself and to take care with yourself so that the healing can continue . . . even in an accelerated fashion. So you can feel more comfortable as you are healing and still attend to whatever you need to attend to... and now you may not be sure that you’ve really been in a trance . . . or you may be sure that you’ve been in a trance, but whatever your experience has been, make sure that you validate yourself for being where you are, for having responded the way you responded, give yourself permission to be exactly the way you are and to have had the experience that you’ve had, and when you are ready, at your own rate and your own pace . . . you can start to complete your experience of being in trance, and when you are ready, start to reorient your body the way it was when you first started sitting on that chair, let yourself experience what you experience, feel what you feel. There’s nothing that you need to do particularly except just reorient to the present time and present place, to come back to your body sitting in the chair, to you and your body sitting in your chair. And when you are ready to come all the way out of trance, just reorient, open your eyes, and come all the way back. All right. Welcome back, gentlemen. And what I'd like to ask from you in the peanut gallery is questions or comments, and for each of you [participants in the demonstration] to say a few things about your experience. The point of having three people in a demonstration is to show you similar kind of words produce wholely different kind of experiences and responses. It shows you how to talk in a way that doesn’t intrude upon one person’s experience when they may not be doing what the other person is doing. It’s a little more of a challenge and uses a

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few Ronald Reagan words. Sometimes I was talking to one person and sometimes to all three of them. AUDIENCE: What presuggestion did you make that all three of those guys have the same kind of shoes on. (Laughter) It’s weird. BILL: It was the soul induction I did earlier. Careful seating and selection. AUDIENCE: Were you able to regulate their breathing patterns just by your speech? BILL: Not particularly, I just went back and forth and after a while they sort of came a little to a middle ground, but they never were totally aligned. I just go to one person for a while and meet and match that person, and then another person for a while, and pretty soon they come a little more to the middle because my voice is sort of the pace after a while, but not always. AUDIENCE: So that’s kind of like a group trance? BILL: Not kind of like, it is a group trance. AUDIENCE: But not necessarily a common presenting problem. BILL: They really didn’t have a presenting problem. I knew Wayne had been through an operation and was healing, and that’s really about the only thing that I knew one would want to work on. I put something about that in there in the end for Wayne, but I wasn’t really working on that. AUDIENCE: Well I guess my question is under what situation would I want to do a group trance? BILL: Well, I suppose if they did have similar presenting problems that might be a good thing. If you were doing a group and wanted to do some trance with them in that particular setting. Or if you wanted to do a demonstration in a workshop. AUDIENCE: Or maybe doing family therapy. BILL: Doing family therapy, that’s a possibility. If you have more than one person in your office and wanted to do trance with them, a couple whatever. That’s good. What else? How about from you three? WAYNE: I was surprised. I didn’t think anything was happening, and surprised when I realized that my hand had moved. I thought

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maybe just one of them could do that and then the other did, too. The other surprise was that my nose started dripping. BILL: That was the earlier suggestion you did and you got it now. We put a time release capsule on it. WAYNE: A time delay, you said something about I might see colors, and I didn’t see any, and then later I saw purple. BILL: Are you a slow learner but trainable, is that it? Okay, that was interesting.

FRED: One of the things that happened at first just after we got into it was like I could see a tunnel. It was more like light, and it would narrow and focus, focus and get small, and go away and then start again. I had that some. And when you asked us to wake up from the neck up, it was amazing how dead I felt from the neck down. Not dead like I couldn’t feel it, but it felt hot and numb and strange. I was also, I think, not ever unaware that there was an audience and I felt a

little self-conscious of that and real aware of that. BILL: Okay. Robert, do you want to say anything about your experience? ROBERT: I think I felt like I always felt. BILL: Not sure you were in a trance. Any other experiences within that experience? ROBERT: No. BILL: Okay. Other comments or questions on this? WAYNE: I also have some of that question of “was I really in a trance,” but I figure if Iwasn’t then that. . . BILL: You don’t usually do this (lifting up a hand) during one of your conversations?

AUDIENCE:

Do you remember laughing out loud?

WAYNE: Oh yeah. I liked the joke about the lady who was scared of needles. What do you do with someone who seems to be uptight and holding on into atrance... BILL: I keep giving them permission and finding out how they respond. Now the question is of the people that you saw up here, what did you see that looked like trance? Levitation—that was pretty obvious sign, again for Fred and for us. We say, well, not

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sure you are in trance, but that’s a pretty good external sign. That’s why hand levitation, arm levitation is a pretty nice sign, because it does look different from the usual way of moving. AUDIENCE: FRED:

What did you think when that happened?

I thought, holy shit, what’s happening? (Laughter)

WAYNE: I didn’t respond to it. Now, I thought, well thank God

something’s gonna happen here. BILL: Good. What else did you see that looked like trance? AUDIENCE: I thought I saw his finger move on his right hand, twitch a bit. BILL: Yes, I thought he might do a hand levitation, I wasn’t real attached to it, but I thought he might. AUDIENCE: His hand was trembling at first, but then his other hand was about to go up. WAYNE: I noticed that, too, but it seemed like this one wanted to go up. BILL: The hand has a mind of its own, I guess. AUDIENCE: Lack of facial movement. . . BILL: Okay. AUDIENCE: Robert, for a while there I thought that you were going to, that your breathing would remain the same but it changed, you kind of stopped chewing something, and I don’t know whether that was intentional or not. ROBERT: Yes, I realized I might have been distracting myself by doing that, so I stopped. AUDIENCE: Your breathing got a lot more regular. BILL: Less movement as you went on. Okay, what else? ROBERT:

Early on, my feet wanted to shift, and I didn’t know if

that was all right to do that or not, and you said to take care of yourself and I said, well it feels better, so I’m gonna shift ’em. BILL: That’s all right. Okay, what else? What made it seem as though they were in trance or not, what signs did you see? ROBERT: I started to twitch with the hands and just completely stopped.

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BILL: Yes, we saw the fluttering of the eyelids for a while, and then they got real still. All right, what else? So who would you say went into trance the quickest? AUDIENCE: Fred. BILL: You think so? I would have said Wayne. Wayne just got real immobile very, very rapidly, then Fred, and I wasn’t ever sure whether Robert was in. At times I thought, “Yeah, he’s getting into it,” and then at other times I couldn’t tell.

AUDIENCE: Have you found that with the hand levitations that it’s more likely that in levitation they start out like this (with hands apart) as opposed to like this (hands clasped)? BILL: A little more likely, but not 100% correlated. That’s why I usually say to people, “Uncross your arms and uncross your legs.” But I’m not real attached to it. Sometimes it’s much more profound for people when their hands are together to have hand levitation because they think they are never going to move like this, and all of a sudden they are moving and coming apart. It’s very, very profound for them. To have that conscious thought, “I don’t think anything is going to happen here,” or “I’m interested to find out what sort of thing will happen,” and then to have something happen is very, very convincing. AUDIENCE: Why were you unsure with Robert? BILL: Because I saw some indicators that he was starting to go into trance, but I didn’t see a lot. The breathing changed, he got more immobile. The eye fixation was happening pretty well. Then I saw some signs of moving around, shifting, the breathing wasn’t always consistent, the facial muscles flattened out a bit but not as much as I usually see them in a trance. AUDIENCE: The first exercise that we did, when I was watching Robert it seemed like he’d start to go and then there’d be some involuntary movement, and when we first did our exercise, I wasn’t willing to go with that so I started to defocus, and my eyes would start to see, and then Id start to bring myself back, and that seemed like that sort of in and out sort of thing.

BILL: Yes, and I had that sense, too. All I would say to do with that is a little more inclusion of that to make sure he knows that’s

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okay and supported and so it’s not like “Oh boy, are you resistant!” or “Youw’re not willing to let go,” or whatever. So it doesn’t become an accusation, it doesn’t become a failure, but it becomes, “Okay,

you are learning whether you can do this and trust yourself in this situation and how you can do it.” But I saw some of that same sort of stuff, and what I'd be doing if I were just working with him alone is doing a lot of communicating about and supporting of that. AUDIENCE: Is it possible to say at the end of the trance that maybe he didn’t go as deep as he wanted to and the next time he could go deeper? BILL: Yes, absolutely. I'd link it to the next time, and I’d say he could in the future. Or that he was starting to get a little experience with it, which, and this is my absolute belief about it, he was

starting to get a little experience with trance and he didn’t go into a trance. He sort of put his little toe in a few times and that was about it. AUDIENCE: And also that is the kind of thing I’'d have, particularly with clients who are used to the traditional, as I was before coming here, caught going into the scary feelings of “I don’t know.” BILL: Right. Or the opposite way, trying too hard, trying to make it happen. I want it to happen, so much that I’m gonna try to make it happen. Either direction—“I’m scared and I don’t want to let go, and it’s too tough,” or “I really want this to happen, and I’m going to try too hard.” Either one is antithetical to trance, so you have to find some way to include those and have them move towards trance. Great, okay, good. Thank you for being up here and taking the risk to come up. I appreciate it. Now it is time for you to practice eliciting trance phenomena—

typically, the ways we elicit hand levitation. I need you to find the handout (3.2) entitled Methods for Evocation in Solution-Oriented Hypnosis. This fits exactly with what we want to do in this approach. We don’t want to program people from the outside saying you have to respond like this, but give them a bunch of invitations

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Handout 3.2 Ee ee ee ee Ne a eeeee Seer UR OE SE mee eke St METHODS FOR EVOCATION IN SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

Anecdotes; Stories; Analogies; Common, Everyday Processes,

Experiences, or Objects

universal specific to the person’s background they’ve told you about them you've gathered indirectly or have guessed imagery—usually given in a one-step removed manner specific; general/vague; different sensory modalities situations/activities Presuppositions; Expectations rate

variations before/after/during awareness multiple choice alternatives Interspersal emphasizing certain words or phrases nonverbally puns Direct Permissive Suggestions possibility words and phrases

and a smorgasbord of possibilities for response. Then we notice which possibilities they respond to and amplify those by saying, in effect, “That’s right, those hands can lift on their own.” Once Fred started to show me that response I gave him a lot of amplification for that and support for that. Meeting him where he was and amplifying new responses in the direction I was suggesting. Once he starts to show me a response, I’ll ride on it and start to link one response to another. When I saw Wayne respond as well I thought, “Great! I think that Wayne is ready to do a body dissociation because he responded so well. He’s been very immobile. That immobility sug-

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gests a good trance to me.” My guess is he was having some feelings of numbness or dissociation or lack of awareness of where his body was, because he wasn’t orienting to it proprioceptively. I thought he’d probably be able to develop a really good body dissociation. I though Id give him the opportunity and thought it would be a nice thing, given that he’s recovering from surgery on his leg, for him to experience that sense of dissociation, having his body work on its own. It had all sorts of implications. Once I saw that response I thought, “Great,” ride on that. In solution-oriented hypnosis, there are a bunch of ways to evoke experience rather than to add it from the outside. Using anecdotes, stories, common, everyday processes or objects, either universal ones (we talked about those before with the eating popcorn kind of thing and having your hand hit bottom, for dissociation), or specific to the person’s background — either that they have told you about or that you know about indirectly or that you have gathered or guessed about. David and I talked over lunch, so I knew that he played the flute. If ’m working with David I can talk about how your fingers can work automatically without you thinking about them when you are playing music. I know that if he was good enough to play in a band that he probably has had that experience of fingers operating automatically when he played the flute. He joked over lunch, “I used to not have much money and now I’ve got these boats and cars,” now I know that he sails, so I'll start to talk about

sailing or driving out on a lake or whatever. I’ve gathered some things about his life indirectly or directly from what he has said. So one thing or another that I know about a person I can use. (To a participant in the front row) I know that you juggle. I can talk about the little pieces of experience that go into learning and doing this thing called juggling. At first it was little muscle movements. While I’m talking about that, that can evoke hand levitation for you because you have done juggling, as your hands move now in response. Thank you, hand, for showing that response, that was nice. Use things that you have observed about them or they’ve told you about them or that you can infer about them. Analogies. Use common, everyday experiences or observations.

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Like the analogy of doing hand levitation when you say, “Imagine that a helium balloon is tied onto your wrist or fingers.” Now in solution-oriented approaches, that’s much too direct because if they don’t visualize the helium balloon, they may think, “Oh no, I’ve failed.” So what we usually do to make it less threatening is use one-step-removed analogies. For example, “Some people imagine a helium balloon tied onto their wrist or fingers.” We've already talked about presupposition and expectation in terms of inducing a trance and with hand levitation and arm levitation: “I wonder which hand will lift up first.” You'll hear Erickson do a few of these in this next taped example. Interspersal, again, involves emphasizing certain words. Did you notice while I was working with Dennis how much I interspersed words? I said, “Now your unconscious mind can come up with certain things and you can face certain difficulties, and it’s nice to know your unconscious can help you move towards goals.” I was emphasizing certain words: up, move, face, hand, arm. Some

of those words were emphasized as nonverbal emphases, interspersed suggestions. Sometimes they were puns, sometimes direct

words. Direct permissive suggestion: “That hand can lift up, the arm can lift up, the hand can feel numb, you can wake up from the neck up and stay in trance from the neck down.” General permissive empowering suggestions. All right? We'll see and hear a couple of examples of Erickson doing this in the taped examples I’ll play for you now.

Videotape Example #3: Milton Erickson— Hand/ Arm Levitation (1958) The first example is an excerpt from a tape made in 1958. Erickson was at Stanford, and his work was being studied and they were filming him. He’s just been introduced to this woman, and one of the first things he says to her as she sits down is, “Are you forgetting about the lights?” because they have these big, bright lights to do the filming. And what’s that a suggestion for? Negative

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hallucination. He just asks it, sort of presumes it. And she says, “Oh no, should I?” He says, “Oh no, but you can, you know.”

Then he starts in with his invitation to experience hand/arm levitation.

ERICKSON: And I’m going to take hold of your hand in a moment or so. Now, as you watch your hands, they’re resting there. And do you know about the feelings you have when you are feeding a baby and you want the baby to open its mouth, and you open yours instead of the baby? And did you ever put on the.brakes when you were in the backseat of a car? RUT ER: “Yes. ERICKSON: Well, I would like that same kind of automatic movement. Now look at my hands. You see very, very slowly, without it being a voluntary thing, my right hand can lift and it can lower. And the left hand can lift and lower. Now what I’d like to have you understand is this: that you have a conscious mind, and you know that and I know that, and you have an unconscious mind or a subconscious mind. And you know what I mean by that, do you not? Now you could lift your right hand or your left hand consciously, but your unconscious mind can lift one or the other of your hands. . He gives her an example of common, everyday experiences of automatic muscle movement. You want to feed a baby. You open your mouth when you want the baby to open its mouth. ERICKSON: And Id like to have you look at your hands, and I’m going to ask you a question. And you do not have to know the answer to that question consciously, and you'll have to wait and see what the answer is. Here he’s inviting her to focus her attention.

ERICKSON: I’m going to ask you: Which hand is your unconscious mind going to lift up first? The right hand or the left?

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“Which hand is your unconscious mind going to lift up first, the right or the left?” Good use of presupposition. He’s presumed that a hand is going to lift up, possibly both hands (because he asks which hand is going to lift up first). He also presumes that the unconscious mind will lift the hand. ERICKSON: And you really don’t know. But your unconscious knows. That’s right. And it’s beginning to lift one of your hands. Lifting, lifting, lifting, lifting up. And now watch it. That’s right. Watch it lifting, lifting, lifting. Up it comes. Lifting higher. And watch it. Soon you'll notice it. And keep watching your hand and watching it. And if you wish, you can close your eyes and just feel your hand lifting higher and higher. That’s right. Lifting still more. That’s right. Elbow will start bending and the hand will come up. That’s right. Lifting, lifting. And now close your eyes and just feel it lifting, and it’s lifting higher and higher. And I’m going to take hold of this hand. And it’s lifting, lifting, lifting, lifting. That’s right. And the other hand is lifting, lifting up. That’s right. Now I kind of like this segment because I’ve had enough experience to understand that Erickson didn’t get a good response. There is this attribution of omnipotence with him but this shows, as you can see, he’s saying, “Lifting, lifting,” but it’s not lifting. But Erickson’s mastery wasn’t that he always got every response he tried to elicit, but that if he wasn’t getting it one way, he’d go for it another way — he was very persistent, and he was very creative. So, he decides, okay, she’s very compliant, but she’s not doing levitation, so he just induces catalepsy. He lifts both hands up, induces catalepsy and then he does this wonderful thing where he suggests that one can go down and one can go up. He links those two together—so if she’s going to express resistance by not lifting up her hand, he’s given her the chance to express that resistance by having it go down, but she’s now being responsive by resisting. She’s responsive in a way that is resistantly responsive. So it’s a clever move, I think, and a nice way to do it.

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ERICKSON: Now I mentioned before that the hand could lift and it could go down. And now I wonder if you know which hand is going to go down first? One or the other is going to go down. And down it comes. That’s right, that’s right. Down it comes, down it comes, and coming down still more.

Still more. Down

it comes,

down it comes. “So, which hand is going to go down first?” He uses the same presupposition he used before only this time it’s about going down. One starts to move, and he says, “That’s right.” He’s reinforcing and amplifying that response. ERICKSON: And as it comes down, I want you to go deeper and deeper into the trance. I’d like to have you enjoy going deeper and deeper. And when your hand reaches your lap, you'll take a deep breath and go even deeper into the trance, because you’re beginning to learn how now. That’s right, coming to rest there. That’s right. Now take a deep breath and go way deep asleep. Now, he into trance: deeper into into trance.

gets another response and links that with going deeper “As the hand goes down, I want you to go deeper and the trance.” Then, he links enjoyment to going deeper Then, he links taking a deep breath and going deeper

into trance.

ERICKSON: And now let it seem to you as if many minutes had passed. And Id like you slowly to arouse and look at me and talk to me. And slowly rouse up now, slowly rouse up, rouse up now. And open your eyes. That’s right. And you’re beginning to learn to go into a trance. Do you realize that? RUTH: I think so. ERICKSON: You think so. And how does your hand feel? RUTH: Um-—a little heavy. “Do. you realize you are beginning to go into a trance?” Presupposition, implication, behaviorally, linguistically, both in that oneminute span there. You notice she could hardly find her voice there, that changed voice quality I talked about there.

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ERICKSON: A little heavy; and can you see your hand plainly? RUTH: The one in my lap? Yes. ERICKSON: And this one? RUTH:

Yes.

Again a suggestion for negative hallucination, “Can you see your hand plainly?” Why would you ask that? It is implied that she can’t or won’t be able to sometime in the future. ERICKSON: Now watch that hand as it gets closer and closer to your face. That’s right. That’s right. He never told her to move that hand, he just said, “Watch it as

it gets closer and closer to the face.” It starts to move and he reinforces that response: “That’s right.” She starts to smile. ERICKSON: And I would like to have you pay full attention to the sensations of the movement of your arm, the bending of your elbow, and the way that hand is getting closer and closer to your face. So, he just wants her to pay attention to the sensations, the movement of the elbow, implying it’s going to bend, now all he wants her to do now is attend to it. ERICKSON: And very shortly it is going to touch your face, but it’s not going to touch your face until you are ready to take a deep breath and to close your eyes and go way deep, sound asleep. Here he has used linking by giving a contingent suggestion.

ERICKSON: That’s right, almost ready, almost ready. That’s right, that’s right. And it’s moving, moving. That’s right. And you’re waiting for it to touch your face and getting ready to take that deep breath. Getting ready to go way deep, sound asleep in a deep trance. Almost touching now, that’s right, almost touching now. And yet it isn’t going to touch until you are ready to take

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that deep breath and your eyes will close. That’s right. Getting closer and closer and closer. That’s it, elbow bending more, fingers move up to touch your chin. That’s right, that’s it. Almost there, almost there. And now your head starts bending forward. That’s right. And you'll take a deep breath and go way deep asleep. That’s right. Now he’s attributing, linking, describing, and reinforcing her responses.

Videotape Example #4: Milton Erickson— Hand/ Arm Levitation (1975) Now here’s an example from 1975. This is Monde again, and in this segment Erickson is inviting hand levitation. First he re-evokes an experience she has had, observing her husband doing a hand levitation.

ERICKSON: Now you remember Nick’s hands lift upward. I wonder if you know which of your hands is going to move up toward your face? And now you have that doubt. It’s going to lift up and move rapidly, up toward your face. You’re just beginning to know which one it is, since you’re not going to be too sure until it’s off your thigh.

Erickson makes an attribution of doubt: “and now you have that doubt, it’s going to lift more rapidly up towards your face.” She smiles, showing a response, nodding, “Just beginning to know which one it is.” See it move in that stepwise fashion? She smiles.

ERICKSON: And sooner or later, I don’t know just when, you will be wondering about something that you would like to see. I don’t know if you can open your eyes and see it. Maybe youll see it with your eyes closed. A something you have not seen for a long time that pleased you then, and which you have forgotten about. I talked with a young woman the other night and she didn’t know what that good feeling was. She was holding her dog, and that was

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before she went to school. And some of the hopes that you had in your childhood. Here he’s linking the response he’s getting with the hand levitation to something else he wants to have happen, a positive hallucination. “Sooner or later you’ll be wondering about something you can see. I don’t know if you'll see it with your eyes open or closed.” And later, he has her do a visualization externally, she sees it out-

side of herself. She sees little Monde playing with ducks and then catching a fish and then she sees Monde kicking in a window. He’s preparing her for that. Once he gets a response he links that to the next thing he wants to have happen. It’s vague but directed: Something she hasn’t seen for a long time but that pleased her and she’s forgotten about. To help elicit such a memory, he tells a story about another woman that had age regression and had some feeling from the past. She didn’t know what the good feeling was, but she was holding a dog, and it was before she went to school. He’s channeling the memories into good experiences and pleasant experiences and also maybe guiding an association into animals. And she remembers chasing some ducks and having a good feeling. He’s guiding her associations, attention, and channelling them. He isn’t just saying remember anything, but “remember a good feeling.” ERICKSON: Up it comes. Faster. And faster. Now you know. And it’s pleasing to know. And it’s something like that feeling —up toward your face—that feeling when once before in your infancy you discovered your hand belonged to you. And a nice thing to learn—up toward your face. And your unconscious is showing that jerky movement, because your unconscious has allowed your conscious mind to use fluid movement; and your unconscious does it in this more or less reflex-like way. And it’s going to touch your face; and when it touches your face you won't be able to keep your left, your right hand in that position. You can’t put it down now, your left hand has to touch your face first. Up it goes. Now you and I can be all alone here. That’s alright. And I can talk to anybody I wish. And Nick, I don’t want you to go into trance just yet. But your unconscious mind is learning a great deal right now; only

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you don’t know what it is learning. I'll tell you one of the things you're learning. And that is that your left hand is beginning to lift without your intention. And now your eyelids are showing you difficulty, and your face is smoothing out. Linking, contingency, right hand won’t go down. Negative hallucination: “you and I can be here all alone.” Talking to Nick now, “I don’t want you to go into trance just yet.” ERICKSON: And while I’ve been talking elsewhere, Monde, you’ve been going deeper and deeper asleep. And now let’s get that left hand up to your face so that your right hand can go down. Closer and closer. It’s only about three inches; two and threequarters. That’s right, you enjoy that. And it can come to you as a surprise when your right hand knows before you do just when your face is touched by your left hand. Closer and closer. And maybe you can do a bit of cheating, only you don’t know what I mean. That’s right, you’re beginning the cheating. Only you don’t know what I mean; but your unconscious does, and I'll identify it for

you. You’re moving your head so slightly downward to meet your hand. And I hope you enjoy it as much as I wish. And you'll probably enjoy it more than I can know. How’s it going to culminate; your head going to move down and touch your hand, your hand going to move up and touch your face? You really don’t know, but you’re going to find out. Now which one is it going to be? Now you thought for a moment it’d be your hand. Still thinking it’s your hand. And when it touches, your right hand will drop. Okay, good. I have an exercise, and this exercise we'll do in a different way. You’re all going to do this exercise tomorrow, but right now what I'd like to do is have two people come up here and have me be your coach. You'll do it in a fishbowl fashion and I'll be your alter ego, giving you some ideas on how to do it. I have my eye on a couple of people. You, Sharon, because you are such a trance junkie. Have you ever done hand levitation in trance before? Oh, you say you’ve never been in trance before? Well, I saw you go into one earlier, okay. I'd really like you to do the induction if you are willing, Priscilla. Okay, good.

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What I’m going to do is be Priscilla’s alter ego. She’s going to start out and maybe think, “I don’t know what to say,” but I’m just going to tell you what to say if you get stuck and you will just repeat my words as if I didn’t say them. Speak on the exhale and go for inviting hand and arm levitation. Again, don’t get attached to it happening. Me and Milton Erickson are back here doing it, and you’re going to speak to Sharon and say, “How will it happen, when will it happen, in what way? Will the finger move first, will the thumb move first?” and all that stuff. Then, if you can think of it, think of everyday analogies that you or Sharon might have had, automatic hand or arm movements. Especially involving the hand and arm, doodling, or raising your hand in class. I have a few hints for you. Use empowering suggestions: “The hand might lift up, the hand can lift up.” You might also emphasize or intersperse suggestions for hand levitation, like “up and lift.” “I went to England and instead of calling them elevators, they call them lifts, so what you’ve got to realize is that each culture has it’s own idiosyncratic language.” You might talk about someone trying to muscle in on your territory or whatever it may be. You can emphasize those words, muscle, lift, and arm. I used one, “Dennis,

it can be pretty disarming the first time you have hand levitation,” to suggest dissociation from the arm and also to mark out the word “arm.” So, you are going to be using any or all of that stuff. Your job is to make as many mistakes as you can and to feel awkward and stuck, and Ill just feed you lines. But, initially, just start out with the trance induction, and if you only get a few words out, great, or a couple of sentences, that’s fine, and I’ll jump in as soon as I have something to say.

Exercise #3: Fishbowl Induction and Levitation PRISCILLA: Sharon, as we are doing this just breathe any way you want to and I'll catch the rhythm. So. . . and a little bit earlier we talked about whether or not it was more comfortable for you to open your eyes or close them, which would you rather do for this?

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SHARON: Close my eyes. PRISCILLA: Okay. So you just breathe normally .. . BILL: Rather than “breathing normally,” “you can,” so it doesn’t sound like a command, so if she’s not breathing normally, she’ll think she’s supposed to. Okay. PRISCILLA: And if you feel like smiling or frowning or whatever, that’s good for you to do that just whatever . . . BILL: I wouldn’t say, “that’s good,” I wouldn’t emphasize the things that I don’t particularly want more of. But she can smile if she wants, and that’s okay, but if her hand moves, I'd say, “That’s

right,” or “That’s good,” or “That’s fine.” But if she smiles, it may be a bit of a distraction for her. I just allow that, rather than reinforce it. Okay. Bill’s comments are in Ppparentheses.)

PRISCILLA: And somewhere in the past, I’m sure that you have had an experience where you had to lift your arm to do something like lifting groceries out of the car, especially when they get down in the trunk of the car and you really have to reach for them and lift them up. And I’m wondering if possibly we might get some hand lifting this afternoon. (as you go into a trance... ) As you go into a trance, (even if you’re not consciously sure what a trance is yet) even if you’re not consciously sure what a trance is yet, possibly your arm will lift. (I want to presuppose that the arm will lift, so I don’t want to say, “possibly your arm will lift.” I could say, “Your hand and your arm can lift up automatically, and I really don’t know whether it will right away or as we go along in trance.” Now, as I say that and as you were talking, the fingers and thumb started to move, and I would start to attend to that and

amplify it, “Now it may be that you notice that your thumb is moving.”) It may be that you notice that your finger and thumb is moving, and if you do, I’m wondering which (hand is most likely to lift first. . . ) hand is most likely to lift first (which hand does she think is most likely?) which hand is most likely to move first. Your unconscious mind knows, and I’m wondering which one it will choose. (Or will it be both?) Or will it be both? (and move at

the same time) And they may move at the same time.

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(Now you want to time your suggestions for lifting to her inhalation. If you watch her upper arm as she breathes, it tends to move up, and her hands tend to move, so we better time the suggestions for lifting.) So when your unconscious decides which one will be the one to move first, or both . . . (“It can lift,” time that to that breathing, because she’s right on the verge of having that lift off her thigh, that’s right.) That’s good, it’s lifting, lifting. (But will it lift all the way to the face?) (Sharon laughs.) Sorry. (It’s kind of weird to be watching and listening to this whole process, isn’t it? That’s why I chose you, Sharon, ’cause I knew you could listen to this, be amused at the same time and still have it happen, so just get back into the kind of trance that’s appropriate for you, that’s right.) Movement is beginning. When some people go into trance, they giggle. (Some people do hand levitation by going into trance. I would assume she is already going into trance or is in trance a bit, and now I'd just be working on hand levitation. “And continue in that process and be interested and amused by it.” And now once you’ve got the response, be leading all the way up or to another response, speculating how far it will lift, if it will lift all the way to her face, whether she’ll notice it or whether she’ll lose track of it while it’s lifting, whether it will go in a straight line, all those possibilities. But now I'd have my visualization about it touching her face and lifting up more. So I’ll be quiet for a minute, and you can say more.) And I’m wondering as your arm is lifting, where it’s going, is it going to lift straight up or is it going to lift out and up, is it going to lift directly to your face, lifting, up, whether it will lift to your nose, or whether it will lift up to your cheek and I’m wondering if you think that’s pretty silly, now, but it’s lifting and when? When it will lift up all the way to your face, lifting, I’m wondering if there is some doubt, while it’s still lifting? (That’s nice and inclusive.) And I’m also wondering as it lifts, how long it will take, but that’s okay, as it lifts closer, lifting closer, lifting higher? My mind is wondering whether or not you can bend your head to meet it. (Now I’m going to give you another tangent to go on. She’s learning something, going into trance and that’s nice and having hand levitation which is new for her, but you might as well link

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the hand lifting then to a personal goal that she has, link it to her personal motivations. Now you know Sharon better than I, maybe you have talked to her a little, but what I know right now is she is wearing a crystal. So she probably has some new age kind of ideas and is probably into healing, like many therapists are. So why not link the lifting of the hand to some personal healing she’d like to have happen? Something personal, getting in touch with herself spiritually, because then it will be more motivation for that hand to lift up to her face, so the motivation comes from inside of her rather than the outside. So if you can link it to that, that would be nice.) As that hand is lifting, Sharon, I’m wondering whether or not it would be something that you would want to have happen when your hand touches your face, when it lifts up to your face, that you could have some type of confidence, achievement, whatever you choose, happen for you. (Now, I would link it to this workshop, a sense that you’ve been really integrating the learnings and that you’ve developed more and more confidence about your ability to use trance in a way that is both right for you personally and professionally. That’s another thing we know about her. She came to a hypnosis workshop, she probably wants to learn this.) Your hand is lifting more rapidly now, and when it touches your face you'll have a feeling of confidence and competence. (You’re on pretty good ground to say “you will” but if she doesn’t, then we are in deep trouble. Because she’s already showing so much response in this, I think it’s likely that she would, but it’s a little too

directive.) Lifting up, lifting more rapidly, and when it touches your face, you can realize any goals you set for yourself. (or any particular goal) Lifting and I’m wonder as your hand is lifting, lifting to your face, the realization, the confidence, that those goals you have set for yourself can be achieved, lifting . . . almost there. (That’s right . . . )That’s good, almost there . . . (so close you can almost taste it) You are very close, you’re almost there. (And [d like to invite you, Sharon, after it touches your face, take just about 30 seconds of clock time, and you can come out of trance.)

Very close. (With that hand up there, or you can have that hand go all the way back down.) You can have that hand where it is or you can choose to let it come back down. And take a few seconds

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to reorient yourself to this time and place. (That’s great, good, terrific. ) SHARON:

That’s the weirdest damn thing I ever did.

Oh, I bet we could find some contenders, but one of the weird-

est, we'll buy that. We could ask your friends that are here. (Laughter) No, no, they’re not going to tell. Well, good, good job, good job, terrific, all right. You went for it, and you did it, that’s great.

Why choose Sharon? She’s a trance junkie like me. I knew she would be very responsive. As I’m teaching, I watch you all and watch how you respond, and I get a sense that some people are pretty responsive. I had the sense with Sharon that it wouldn’t be too intrusive for her for me to be talking while she went into trance. I have a sense you people are getting this stuff. ’'m happy with the day and your responses. When we get back here in the morning, we are going to get to the punch line: Why would you ever do trance; what’s trance good for? We are also going to be taking up the topic of what the unconscious mind is in this approach. And if the unconscious is so smart, as Erickson implied, why do we have symptoms? We are going to be taking that up tomorrow, having you do more practice. The practice tomorrow, though, will not just be namby-pamby, wishywashy stuff like, “You can do anything you want and go anywhere you want in trance,” but will be about getting specific responses, like hand levitation, like time distortion, like age regression, things that you specifically go for. We'll have another answer tomorrow for the question of why to use trance phenomena in treatment. We'll give you a clear model for treatment, what you do once the person gets into trance. So you have gone for it today, you have learned a lot on the conscious and unconscious level, I’m sure. And I suppose you all know what dreams are for, so I suggest you use your dreams in various ways for your benefit tonight to integrate the learnings, to expand the learnings or just to help you get a good night sleep so you can be fresh to learn even more tomorrow.

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HIS MORNING WE GET TO the punch line. Why would you ever use trance? What is hypnosis good for? You’ve gotten along fine in your clinical practice without using hypnosis so far, so why do you need it now? To answer these questions, we have to start with the question: What is the unconscious? In the Ericksonian approach, when we use the word “unconscious,” we mean something different from the Freudian view of repressed urges and primal urges that the ego or the superego have to deal with. Erickson used the concept in several different ways. One of those views is a little like the Freudian preconscious, a repository for those things you don’t keep in your conscious mind, but could recall if you wanted. Another Ericksonian definition of the unconscious is that it is your deeper, wiser self. A third definition is that the unconscious is your jukebox of learnings, that is, your jukebox of memories. When you press the right button it stimulates a certain brain operation and you remember certain things. It’s like a jukebox of information that you have stored that you don’t keep in your conscious mind and perhaps couldn’t deliberately recall. So it’s not even preconscious. In this third definition, the unconscious consists of sensory memories that you have from your life. The third definition is more relevant to what we are talking

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about this morning. The third view refers to all the stuff you have on automatic pilot. Erickson used to say, “Trust your unconscious.” And you'll hear Ericksonians saying, “Your unconscious is

creative and smart, it’s a wise part of yourself, much wiser than the

conscious part of yourself, which is limited because of the limiting beliefs that you hold consciously.” Ihave a friend, Joe Barber, from Los Angeles. You'll hear some of his stuff on a taped example in a little while. He can be a very critical kind of guy, and he doesn’t like the Ericksonian movement a lot with all this “guru-fixation” of Erickson and the purple pajamas that people wear. He knows I’m a little irreverent as well. He and I went out to lunch at one of the Erickson conferences and he said, “You know, these Ericksonians are driving me crazy running around saying, “Trust your unconscious, your unconscious is smart and creative.’ Don’t they know the unconscious is dumb, dumb,

dumb?!” he exclaimed. It challenged me pretty well because I must admit I was thinking the unconscious is smart and creative, having been influenced a lot by Erickson. So, I thought it’s a good thing to think about, since it’s good to challenge those fixed and rigid beliefs that one has. Over the years I sorted it out for myself, and this is what I’ve come to. My view is that the unconscious is smart about the things it’s smart about, it’s dumb about the things it’s dumb about and that there are some things that the unconscious is smart about that it is dumb to be smart about. Now this is not a confusion technique —this is clarity. So let me make it clear for you. Let’s start with the idea that your unconscious is smart about the things it is smart about. That means if you know how to play tennis, and you go on out and practice tennis, and you’ve really gotten good at it and played and practiced and taken lessons and you played a whole lot, you’re a really good tennis player. Then you should go out on the tennis court, and when you play tennis you should trust your unconscious. Your unconscious is smart about playing tennis and you should get out of the way, because if you are trying to play tennis consciously or think about it consciously, you'll be a much worse tennis player. If you know how to touch type, you should trust your unconscious to touch type, don’t look at the keys, don’t think about it. If you think about how you do it, it'll go a lot slower and harder. One of the definitions of the

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unconscious, it does things automatically. When you know how to drive a car you do it automatically, you don’t have to think about how to put on the brakes or put in the clutch, once you learn it and your unconscious gets smart about it, you don’t have to think about it. I could do this lecture and play guitar and play a fairly complicated thing on the guitar while I was doing a lecture, because I’ve got both doing the lecture and playing guitar on automatic pilot. Therefore, my unconscious is smart about playing the guitar. If I got a banjo, I couldn’t stand up and play. I couldn’t stand up here and just let it flow through and let the muse inspire because the muse would sound pretty terrible through me at this particular point. So my unconscious is dumb about playing banjo, smart about playing guitar. My unconscious is dumb about playing tennis, so I shouldn’t go out and trust my unconscious because I wouldn’t do very well. I should play very deliberately and try to learn it and think about it a lot and practice a lot, mess around and make mistakes and that would be how my unconscious mind would get smart. I would have to do it a lot to get smart about it. My unconscious mind is dumb about the things it’s dumb about. I don’t know how to touch type, I’m not a good touch typist, so just hitting any keys that seem right to me wouldn’t work. Now to the last category I mentioned— sometimes the unconscious mind is smart about things it’s dumb to be smart about. What I mean by that is back to the naturalistic approach of Erickson. Sometimes we get naturally smart about things it’s dumb to be smart about in certain contexts. Say I was sexually abused or physically abused many, many times when I was younger. And how I learned to deal with that as a coping mechanism was to dissociate my body from the rest of my experience. Like Wayne did yesterday. Only he dissociated his body in a directed, guided way. When you do it spontaneously throughout your life because you’ve been abused you get really good, really smart at dissociating automatically. It’s a really good thing for you to do to survive sexual abuse, physical abuse, it seems that people do it a lot spontaneously, and it’s a great survival skill. Unfortunately, then what happens is you grow up, you get out of that context of abuse and go into another context. Perhaps you get married, or get into a relationship and your partner starts to ap-

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proach you sexually and you dissociate. You’re not there anymore. It’s not a threatening situation, because your partner has never abused you, but your unconscious is so smart about dissociating that you do it automatically. You do it unconsciously. Your unconscious is smart about something it’s dumb to be smart about in that setting. Or say for years it’s been really a good idea to notice pain that you have because it served a signal value for you. Now you’ve got some chronic pain that doesn’t serve any signal value for you at all, it’s just chronic arthritis pain or you are dying of cancer. Now it’s not so useful and smart to notice pain but you’ve had years and years of practice of noticing pain. So your unconscious is smart about something it’s dumb to be smart about in that context.

That leads us to the questions: Why would you ever use trance? What’s it good for and not good for? Somebody asked me this question a while ago. When would you use hypnosis or when not, or do you just use it all the time? No, sometimes my clients have no idea that I use trance unless they find a brochure while in the waiting room and they ask, “You do hypnosis?” They may not have a clue, as it was never appropriate to use it with them. Some only know that I use trance, they don’t know I do anything else. Someone years ago said, “When do you decide to use trance or not use trance?” My response was that I know in the first session with the client whether I’m going to use trance or not. My rule of thumb is to divide the world of symptoms or problems into what I call voluntary and involuntary complaints. That guides my decision about whether or not to use trance. Voluntary /Deliberate Activity Complaints — Contraindicated

Involuntary /Automatic Complaints — Indicated

Actions Interactions Deliberate (nonautomatic) thoughts

Somatic/ physiological difficulties unresponsive to medical interventions Experiential difficulties Obsessive/ automatic thinking Affective difficulties Hallucinations/Flashbacks

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Voluntary complaints are those that the person could produce upon request. If you asked them to show you their symptom, problem, or complaint, they could do it. Involuntary complaints are those that they couldn’t show you upon request. Complaints aren’t involuntary if people say they can’t help it, because almost everybody in therapy is saying on one level or another, “I can’t help it— help me.” I’m just saying, could they do this problem deliberately if you requested it? So if someone came in and said, “I smoke, help me stop smoking,” I could say, “Show me your problem.” They could pull out a cigarette, put it in their mouth, light it up, inhale, flick the ashes off the cigarette and show me what that problem looks like. Now if they said, “Every time I walk into a shopping mall, I break out in a rash,” I could ask them to show me their

rash. And they’d say, “I can’t, I don’t know how to show it to you. Come to the shopping mall and I'll show it to you.” That’s involuntary. If they say, “I yell at my kids,” and I say, “Okay, give me an example, show me what you do.” They could do the yelling: “You little blah blah, go to your room.” They could show you what they did. If they did bulimia, they could show you how they did it. You might not want them to show you, but I don’t usually ask them to show me in the office. If they said, “I’ve got migraine headaches, can you help me?” I could say, “Okay, do a migraine headache so I can see how your family reacts when you have a migraine.” They would reply, “I can’t do that, come to my house when I have one and maybe you could see one then, but I can’t really do one for you.” Migraine headaches, rashes, various things like that are what I call involuntary complaints. Yelling at your kids, smoking, eating in certain ways, those are voluntary complaints. I’m not talking about what they claim about it, I’m just asking myself, is this something they could reproduce upon request or not? I think hypnosis is great for involuntary things and not so good for voluntary complaints. Why? This gets back to what the unconscious mind is. Because I think hypnosis is really good at changing automatic internal experiences. Your unconscious is really smart about those things you consciously don’t know how to change. For example, if I said, “Okay, tell me how it could be. What could you do instead of b)

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yelling at your kids?” They say, “Well, I could go in the other room and cool off.” They could do something deliberately to change that. But if you said, “Tell me what you could do instead of having a migraine headache,” they would say, “I don’t know. I’ve taken medications, tried to relax to reduce the stress in my life. I don’t know what I could do.” They don’t know how they do migraine headaches, and they don’t know how to not do migraine headaches. That is, if they did something deliberate, it probably wouldn’t interfere with their migraine headaches or rashes. If they did something deliberate, it would probably interfere with their smoking or yelling at their kids, or beating their spouse or whatever. Typically, voluntary complaints are actions and typically involuntary complaints are internal experiences. AUDIENCE:

Where would you put depression?

It depends on how they do it. Now you can construe depression as a voluntary complaint primarily, or you might put some ele-

ments of it over in involuntary land. Usually, depression is a combination of actions that people do, cognitions that they have and feelings that they have. I usually put depression in voluntary land and don’t usually use hypnosis with it. You might construe it a different way and if you did, you might use hypnosis with it. Some things are probably somewhat a combination of voluntary and involuntary, but you can ask yourself, what are the main features of it? That’s what I’m suggesting. Think of something like school phobia. Sometimes when I’ve investigated it, it is actually school avoidance. If it is school avoidance, it is mostly voluntary, the person’s just not going to school. It’s called school phobia because that’s the common name for it, but it really is just not going to school. And then sometimes there’s a fear part of school phobia that is a realistic fear, like somebody is going to beat them up in school, and they are afraid of that. And that’s not really phobia, it’s a fear and there may be some actions they could do to change what they fear. Perhaps they could interact with the kids differently or maybe go to a different school. Now there may be a phobia part of it, and that is they have the palpitating heart, of they have sweaty palms or they are shaking or ner-

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vous, and that stuff you might be able to do something about with hypnosis. But, ultimately, even if you change the phobia part, you are still going to have to get the child to walk into school. Even if you change the desire to have a cigarette, you are still going to have to have the person change the habit of smoking cigarettes, which is an action. You can divide it into two parts: the desire to smoke a cigarette, the relaxation they get from smoking a cigarette, those internal experiences are the involuntary parts, and the voluntary part is the smoking behavior. I base my treatment on my assessment of whether the main features of the complaint are voluntary or involuntary. For me, the main feature is the activity of smoking. In flashbacks from sexual abuse the main feature is involuntary and experiential. Hypnosis is great for involuntary stuff and not so great for voluntary stuff. Now you might be thinking, “Wait a minute, those hypnotists who advertise in telephone books and the paper almost always advertise for smoking and weight control.” Well, that’s good marketing because those things make a fair amount of money, but the actual research seems to indicate that about 25% of people with those complaints do pretty well with these approaches and the rest of the people don’t over a two-year follow-up. It doesn’t seem to me a coincidence that about 25% of people are highly suggestible and highly hypnotizable. Maybe they are not the same group. I don’t know if they have ever been compared, but some people would do well no matter what approach you use, and if it’s a suggestion or placebo approach they'll do pretty well. But I don’t think hypnosis is very useful for treating voluntary action complaints. I think hypnosis is profoundly useful and a new set of skills for therapists who have previously only had the skills to treat voluntary complaints. When I first started doing hypnosis, somebody came to me with warts as a presenting complaint. Now as a therapist, rarely did anybody come to me with warts as a presenting complaint. It was smart of them not to come to me for that, because I didn’t have even a clue about how to treat warts. The only way J could have thought to treat them was if I convinced myself and the client that warts come from stress. Then maybe I could reduce your stress to eliminate the warts, because I, as a therapist,

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know how to reduce stress. But in hypnosis I knew exactly how to work with warts. So typically over in involuntary land Id put physiological things, somatic things, and I would put some kinds of thinking, that kind of intrusive automatic thinking we call obsessive thinking. I'd put voluntary, deliberate kinds of thinking in the voluntary category. If I ask you to imagine yourself being assertive and you imagine it, that’s deliberate thinking. But there is some kind of thinking that is obsessive thinking, intrusive thinking that seems to think itself. It’s as if you don’t think it. For example, did I turn the stove off back home, did I lock my door, or obsessive thinking about a former relationship. That kind of stuff. Hallucinations are perceptions that intrude upon your experience involuntarily. Over in voluntary land, it’s actions and interactions and certain deliberate kinds of

thinking. Why do I think hypnosis is good for involuntary things? Because as we said yesterday with trance phenomena, it lets you put your hand on the control knob of experience. It gives you a way to change experience. When you see these stage hypnotists who have people up on stage in hypnosis and get them to eat an onion as if it’s an apple, you are witnessing people’s ability, through hypnosis, to change what seems like an involuntary experience. The hypnotists say to the subjects on stage, “This is really a nice, juicy apple. Here, take a bite of it,” and they do and really enjoy it, and everybody in the audience is amazed. For some reason, hypnosis gives us an ability to alter our internal experience. So that an apple taste can come from our memory, that experience can come even while chewing an onion. Or so that you can, during an operation, control the bleeding. Usually that’s a fairly involuntary skill for most people. If I just said, “During your operation on your knee, Wayne, control the bleeding,” you’d say, “Okay, I'll try, but I don’t know if I'll be able to, I'll be knocked out.” But, I could say to Wayne’s

unconscious mind, “While you are under that general anesthetic, it’s really important for you to bleed just enough to clean the wound and not worry the surgeon and then stop bleeding,” and we could probably have an effect one way or another. Kay Thompson, who studied with Erickson for a while, shows

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a tape of her getting a nose operation in which she doesn’t have any anesthetic and stops the bleeding. It was pretty gross to watch but very impressive. She just deliberately arranged for spontaneous changes in her physiological functioning and in her experience. She somehow achieved a change in the bleeding and a change in the perception of sensation. My father-in-law went through a bone marrow extract using self-hypnosis. He had no anesthetic, I guess they don’t give them for that anyway, and he was perfectly comfortable and it freaked the doctors and nurses out because they couldn’t tell when they got to the core of the marrow because they usually have people squirming all around and have to hold them down. But here he was just perfectly comfortable, and they didn’t understand because he didn’t tell them he was using self-hypnosis. He heard all this hub-bub behind him, and he asked what the problem was and they said, “Usually with people, it’s very, very painful when we hit the spot, and that’s how we know we got there.” He immediately cancelled out the idea of pain they were suggesting to him and substituted an idea that he would feel some different sensation to let him know that they had hit the spot. So he said, “Oh, I didn’t know you needed to know that—TI’ll tell you when it feels different.” Somehow he was able to change what, for most of us, would have been a pretty involuntary experience of pain. For some reason, hypnosis gives us an ability to get our hand on the control knob of experience. I don’t know why exactly, although lots of people in the hypnosis field will give you theories, but I don’t think anybody exactly knows why yet. All we know is that it seems to be able to do that for certain people for certain things. What do you do once you get in trance, what’s the point? To be able to give them access to their natural abilities to alter their experience. Again, we in the solution-oriented hypnosis field believe they already have natural abilities. And what kind of alteration of experience do we want? We want to re-evoke skills and abilities that they have had, sometime in their lives. Like those of you who wear glasses, you’ve learned to negatively hallucinate your glasses, to drop your glasses out of your experience. That’s a nice skill. Although you probably never thought of it as a skill. It can be considered a skill, though, which we can evoke in trance and

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then amplify, so that you would maybe go through an operation without noticing the sensations of the operation. As Kay Thompson did. That’s negative hallucination. If you’ve learned naturally in your life to dissociate because of abuse, why not be able to use that skill to be able to see the trauma,

instead of having it flashback and have to feel the traumatic experience happening all over again. Why not use that ability to dissociate but channel it and guide it in a certain direction, so now they can see it as if it’s on a television screen or movie screen and use

that natural ability and keep their bodies feeling comfortable while they watch the trauma when they review it. What we are trying to do is, instead of having the old stuff happen, which is problematic, we are going to use whatever natural abilities and skills they have, amplify and direct those skills for their benefit. Remember the man I mentioned yesterday when doing the trance, the therapist who had phobias? After he had experienced the double hand levitation and laughing and crying in trance, he noticed that when he would go into one of his previously phobic situations, he would feel this sense of absurd amusement and feel dissociated from the fear. He would notice the anxiety but not get so hooked up in it. Where he used to feel anxious about being anxious, as many people do, now he would step back and observe that he was getting slightly anxious and he would think it absurd and be totally amused by it. Gradually, the phobias went away, in part because he wasn’t getting involved in them anymore. So what are we about when we do this kind of trance treatment? Evoking abilities, previous solutions, and patterns of experience. If you have taken lots of hot baths and relaxed a lot, you have a pattern of experience or previous ability to relax your muscles. If you’ve ever gotten a massage, you might have a memory of relaxing your muscles. Using trance, you can edit and reorganize your experience. You can split some things. Like the phobias this one guy had. He had a phobia of going into large open places, like shopping malls or big supermarkets. He had another one of if he were driving on an interstate in the middle lane, he would feel freaked out like

he was going to faint. If he saw anything medical, he would also have these panic attacks and feel as if he were going to faint. What we did was split off fears from those situations and linked

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in humor and absurdity. So we split and link. You want to make new associations and break old associations. There’s nothing about walking into a supermarket that is inherently anxiety provoking, but he made that linkage in his experience. Looking at medical things on television would for him be linked with a certain anxiety or panic, but it doesn’t need to be. Just as looking at spiders or snakes doesn’t need to be anxiety provoking, but some people have themselves wired up like that. We want to help them split certain parts of their experience, make distinctions they hadn’t made before. You'll see this in some of the work with sexual abuse that I'll show later and with some of the other examples. You want to link in some new associations, new linkages, alter people’s experiences in some way. For example, you might have them experience a tingling instead of a pain. In working with women who are going to give birth, instead of focusing on pain, you could focus on the anticipation of what this child is going to be like. What color eyes will the child have? How much hair will the child have? You could look forward to the personality the child will have. There are all sorts of things you could focus your attention on. Instead of focusing your attention on painful sensations after your operation you could focus on aspects of the experience that are comfortable. So, how do you do it?. What are the techniques? It is a lot of what we talked about yesterday in terms of methods of evocation in solution-oriented hypnosis. You tell anecdotes, stories and you use common, everyday processes or objects that correlate with what you are trying to evoke. You use interspersal, you use metaphor, puns, presupposition, empty words, and general permissive suggestions. The point is what we are going for is not just telling people new ideas and reprogramming them, but evoking experience. We want them to have an experience. Hypnosis is really good for helping people have experiences. I could say to Wayne, “Look, you can dissociate your body, did you know that?” And he might say, “Yes, I guess so, it sounds credible to me, it sounds possible.”

But when he has an experience of it, it’s much more powerful than when I just tell him about it. And hypnosis is really good at creating experience. I could say to Wayne, “Dissociate your body right now,” and he might say, “I don’t know how to do that, I mean I had it yesterday, and maybe I could do it again, but I don’t think

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so.” But if I went through the rigmarole of doing trance with him and said, “Now wake up from the neck up and keep your body in trance,” he could do it, probably would do it, especially since he had done it before. Somehow, in some way, instead of having somebody talk to you and just tell you good ideas or reprogram you, or send you back into your childhood and get repressed memories, what we want to do in solution-oriented hypnosis is to have you experience something that will give you access to new possibilities. My goal is not to go for an explanation of your problem, not to reprogram you with what I think will be good positive beliefs for you, but to give you an experience of something that’s a resource

for you, something that could change the situation for you. I think that’s the difference between therapy that really has an impact on people and therapy that is just a bunch of clever, good ideas. The good ideas may just go in one ear and out the other. But it makes an impact when it really gets into their experience, and makes a difference for them. So, that’s the point and the methods. I’ve tried to give you a clear simple model for when you do trance, why you would do trance, how you would do trance, and what you do when the person is in trance. Next, I’ll have you practice some more and have you generate these kinds of interventions in therapy, how to approach a particular case. We'll have you practice some more in terms of the skills and do some group brainstorming on how to think about certain cases, given a particular model called the Class of Problems/ Class of Solutions model. Before that, any questions? AUDIENCE: On some of the voluntary behaviors like smoking, can’t you approach them with hypnosis by linking them up with involuntary behaviors that can control their behavior, like imaging the taste of an onion when you smoke a cigarette?

One can, and it has been done and done successfully. It wouldn’t be my preferred approach to it. Because I don’t think it works too well. The literature and my experience indicates that usually it

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doesn’t work very well for stuff like smoking and weight control. The person that it works for, it works for 100%, but overall it’s not a widely effective approach. AUDIENCE:

Is it still the 25%?

Yes, people have used aversive techniques, projecting people into the future to anticipate being a non-smoker, and it does work a bit, so I don’t want to say it never works for voluntary complaints, because hypnosis has been used for just about everything. From cancer to bed-wetting to misbehavior. I just think it’s not wildly effective for voluntary complaints. Although it does work on occasion. On occasion, I violate my rules of thumb and just use it with a voluntary complaint because it makes sense in this case or I have a good intuition it’s going to work or because nothing else has worked and I might as well try it, what the heck. But it wouldn’t be my treatment of choice. But your question indicates that you’ve got the point of what I was saying hypnosis is good for; the point being you would access some involuntary experience and link it to the voluntary complaint, which might change their experience of it, their behavior. AUDIENCE:

Can you see any connection between Erickson-

ian conscious/ unconscious with the gestalt foreground /background thing and would that have any value in explaining hypnosis to patients? Sure, I think that you could make some connection between those two. It would be a fairly simple connection. “Foreground” is what’s in the conscious mind and “background” is what is in the unconscious mind. I don’t know about explaining it to people, but using that particular model with somebody might have value. My sense about how to do therapy and what to do in therapy is much more oriented towards solutions than explanations and much more oriented towards evoking abilities and skills, rather than spoiling interventions—having the cigarettes make you nauseous

or taste

like onions. What I’m interested in is evoking abilities and skills that are much more pleasant abilities and skills and linking them

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to things that are pleasant associations. If that works for that particular person, I'd go for it. AUDIENCE:

How about tics?

I would typically call that complaint involuntary. Here’s how I think about it. How would I do a tic if I were a body? Not why I would do it, not what function it serves, not the explanation about

it, but what’s the actual process of the doing of it? Now, usually it’s an involuntary process, the way people report it, and it’s a muscle spasm. How would I do the opposite of muscle spasm, then, what resource might I use for that? One resource one might use for that is muscle relaxation. Here in the person’s experience, go and evoke, don’t teach the muscle relaxation, because in the solution-oriented approach we’d assume they would have a skill called muscle relaxation. So where could I go searching for it? One way is I could ask them, “Have you ever taken a hot bath and not really been thinking about relaxing when you got in the bath, and when you got out of the bath you realized how relaxed your muscles were?” That would be one way to evoke it, to say in novelistic detail how relaxing that experience may be. “Even when your mind was going a mile a minute and you were really tense, thinking-wise, your body, because you were in that heat, just couldn’t support the muscle tension. Perhaps you had 100 plans for when you got out of the bath, but then you decided to just lay down for a while, relax a little more.” You are going to evoke that experience for the person and then transfer it to the problem context. Think of the doing of it, evoke a resource that would be the opposite of what you could use for this and then transfer it to the place where it’s needed.

Exercise #4: Evoking Hand and Arm Levitation Yesterday you saw these courageous people come up and do this wonderful demonstration in which Priscilla hypnotized Sharon (p. 103). That’s exactly the same exercise I want you to do now. What we'll be doing is having you practice so that you can get up to

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speed about being able to do the hypnotherapy parts. This time you are going to go for a precise experience, not just go for allowing the person to have whatever experience they want to have. You are going to try to elicit a specific response. Like Priscilla was trying to elicit a specific response with Sharon of having her hand lift up to her face. Use these techniques that we’ve been talking about. Speak on the exhale, evoke hand or arm levitation by using presupposition and implication, that is, “I don’t know when the hand will lift up, how quickly it will lift up, which hand will lift up, etc.” Never doubt that it’s going to lift up, and once it starts lifting up, never doubt that it’s going to lift to the face. Even though it may not lift up or lift all the way to the face, never doubt that in your speaking. Next, use anecdotes and analogies for hand and arm movement. Any reference to automatic movement will work, like feeding a baby and having your mouth open, putting on the brakes when you are sitting in the passenger side or backseat of the car. But especially hand and arm movements. So come up with a few of those. Let’s brainstorm a few. I'll give you one to start with, but you'd have to be fairly old to know this one, I think. You’d have to be old enough to have kids before seat belts were common. When you put on the brakes in the car and you reach out automatically for the kid in the seat next to you to restrain him. You may still do that even though they are now in seat belts. AUDIENCE:

You do it and there’s no kid.

You reach for the kid and now there’s no kid there, but you do it because you are so used to it. Like Erma Bombeck tells the story that she knew she had been with young kids too long when she was invited out to an important dinner with a bunch of business people and diplomats. She was in a fascinating conversation with a guy next to her, some diplomat from someplace important, and they were having a great time and the guy all of sudden looked at her with a look of horror on his face. She looked down and realized that she was cutting up his meat. (Laughter) So you could tell that story about automatic hand or arm movements. All right? What other kinds of automatic hand or arm movements can you come up with, so to speak?

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Brushing your teeth.

Great. Most people go unconscious while they brush their teeth. AUDIENCE:

Stretching.

Good. What else? I talked before about doodling, how about taking notes at a seminar? AUDIENCE: If you are used to a beeper on the belt, and if somebody else’s goes off in the room you reach for yours. Right, you automatically reach for yours, that’s good. Come up with a few examples that especially have to do with hands and arms and automatic movements. I’m talking about ones that happen automatically, like when somebody throws you a ball unexpectedly and/or examples that involve dissociated movements. We should include both categories. Use those anecdotes or analogies. Analogies would be the helium balloon tied to your hand. Sometimes I say, “For some people it feels as if there is a force pushing up underneath their palm, for some people it feels sort of like a block and a tackle, with a chain attached to their finger or wrist, pulling it up a little at a time.” I'll remind you again that when you use analogies, make them one-step-removed analogies. Not “Visualize a block and tackle pulling your hand up,” but “Some people do. . . ” or “One could ... 3 don’t say, “You do this.” That’s too much pressure and much too directive. Use empowering permissive suggestions: “That hand can lift up automatically, it can lift up without you lifting it up, your unconscious mind can lift it up.” Not could and not might and not probably, but it can. Possibility. Use interspersal— interspersing the suggestions by emphasizing them nonverbally, words like move, lift, up, arm, and hand: “Your unconscious can

keep a lot of knowledge handy for you and can come up with the right knowledge at the right time. It can help you move towards your goals and face things that you hadn’t faced before.” Okay? “And I really don’t know if you think that that hand can lift up and maybe you are consciously sure that that hand won’t lift up.”

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Again, I remind you to time your speaking with the person’s exhalation. Now, I want you to do a quick experiment. Put your hands on your thighs. Do a couple of quick breaths, in and out and notice what happens to your hands and your arms when you breathe in. When you inhale the chest lifts up slightly and your hands lift up slightly. So if you tell the person, “Your hands are lifting up,” when they are exhaling, it’s not going to be congruent with their experience. You might as well wait for the inhale to make one of those lifting suggestions then. I want one talker this time and one listener. Take about 20 minutes. I’ll be around coaching you, I’ll be your alter ego if appropriate and may feed you lines. (The participants do the exercise.) Okay. Start to put your attention back into the big group. How many people experienced hand levitation for the first time in their lives? Let your hands raise slowly. All right. Questions, comments? AUDIENCE: The difficulty I had was, again, concentrating, watching the breathing, looking for those signs. Right, that was a fairly common thing. Here I was going around observing these wonderful responses. I could see that the listener’s hand was starting to move, and I would say to the talker, “Great,

you're getting it!” and they would look surprised, like, “What? I am?” Because I was really focused on the hands, not being distracted by having to think about what to say, I could notice some beginning signs. As soon as you see that response, reinforce it and

amplify it. AUDIENCE: One time I saw Robert’s arm twitching and I got all excited, reinforcing it, but that was it. That was it, just twitching a little. So you just go for it. And what I suggest with David is you just go with it and maybe after a long time of doing that, if you are still not seeing a very noticeable

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125)

response, there are two things to do. The first is to go for very, very small micro-movements rather than go for this big, big thing of lifting all the way up. Just concentrate on eliciting slight movements of the thumb and the finger. The other thing is to say, “Okay, one of your hands can be glued to your thigh and can feel so heavy it won’t come up.” Then you put all the heaviness into one hand and maybe the other hand gets freed up to lift. Because perhaps hand levitation was a good idea, but not one that moved your listener greatly. He might prefer to stay still. AUDIENCE: I think having permission to go real slowly was good, he was using the clock and I could feel something moving, and I felt like I should move it but maybe I didn’t have to do it that fast. Also, it was kind of like a split. I could feel movement and was thinking I want to do it this way. Also, I was consciously thinking about one hand and the other one goes up. Did it surprise you that the other one went up then? AUDIENCE: one.

Yes, because I was much more focused on the

AUDIENCE: Could it be that some people just don’t do hand levitation, like some people don’t do windows. I could put them in a trance some other way maybe? That’s not a major handicap? No, they could be in the slow learners’ class. I would say that for the most part, what you’ve got to do is go for it to the maximum and not be attached to it. When I’m inviting levitation, I have this sense of really going for with this person and I’m not attached. As soon as you get attached there is the possibility of failure. Go for it, and then if it doesn’t happen, cut your (and their) losses and move on to something else. There are lots of ways into trance and lots of ways to get an involuntary muscle response besides hand levitation.

126

SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

AUDIENCE: One thing I noticed was that yesterday I was deeper in trance at times. I would come back and hear Linda’s voice and I know I didn’t hear all she said, yesterday. Today, I heard everything. And I guess with me it was like a control thing. I started out thinking, I’m gonna make her feel bad, and then I thought, this is okay, I can open my eyes and I am more aware than I was yesterday. Well, it speaks to a couple of things. One is there is this idea that only in deep trance do you do these trance phenomena. That’s not necessarily so. Obviously not, given your experience. You were in a lighter trance than you were yesterday. The other thing, for some people, hand and arm levitation invitations will tap into some control issues and for them, and they’ll be monitoring a lot more. Another aspect is that trance can be really interesting, and I suspect that for most of you, some part of you was analyzing and thinking, “I wonder if it’s going to happen? No, I’d rather it be this hand or that hand.” So one part of you is commenting on the process, observing it, thinking about it, deciding about it, and another part of you is having the experience. That’s dissociation. One part is observing, commenting on it, while the hand is just lifting up, and you are in that experience, with that experience, having that experience. Okay? What else? AUDIENCE: Getting back to the thing from yesterday, I realize that there was very much a sense of control there, and if I had Sharon in the office and she started giggling, I would have said, “Hey that’s it, it’s not working, let’s get out of here.” Because I was very, very uncomfortable with that. Right, so sometimes what you have to have is a little persistence and a little faith in the process and not bail out so quickly, deciding that she can’t do it or you can’t do it. Just stick with it. Have a little faith. Somehow give the listener the sense that she’s not a failure if she doesn’t do it. It’s not terrible if she doesn’t do it. It’s just something you were asking for. It’s an invitation with a RSVP, rather than a demand. Don’t make it a demand.

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AUDIENCE: How I experienced the process of being the one who does the trance induction is I go kind of blank. It’s been real interesting to sort of observe myself because the kind of permission-giving phrases that you use a lot, I use a lot with clients in my work and never thought of it as hypnosis. But I’m not pulling them up quite so well when I’m right there in front of the other person. So use your notes. AUDIENCE: I was, I did, but I just wonder if other people are experiencing that kind of “What do I do now?” Yes, a lot of heads are nodding. You are normal. AUDIENCE:

Im used to trusting my intuition, where you

just sort of go through stuff, that’s what I usually do, but it’s not pulling up so fast. Exactly, because you don’t know how to play tennis yet. And trance induction is like tennis. Imean how can I stand up here and teach? Where’s my notes? How can I sit up here and do all these trance inductions?

For me, those things are on automatic pilot.

Now, you do therapy very intuitively, very automatically, but you didn’t when you first did it. You were saying, “They’ve got clients they are putting in the same room with me, oh no, what am I supposed to say to them?” This will happen with hypnosis, it will come. But in order to get to that place you’ve got to do more practice, practice, practice.

AUDIENCE: It’s interesting how much easier it was today than when I was the subject yesterday. Well, she’s obviously better than I am. AUDIENCE:

Maybe I was the one who was better.

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It was probably a combo. Okay, another comment? AUDIENCE: Say, for instance, that you had somebody and they were just twitching or something, but that’s all. Would you take them all the way through the exercises and say, “That’s okay, it’s just an invitation, blah blah blah,” or some-

how in the middle of the exercise, say somehow like, “That’s as far as you need to go, it looks like this is it. . . ”? Either one or both. I don’t have a general rule about that. I'd say it depends on your intuition of where the person is. For an exercise like this I’d prefer that you go all the way through, partly because of what Priscilla and I were just discussing, that sometimes the skill is persistence. It’s about not giving up. Sometimes you tell people to do something and it works really well, and then they come back the next session and say, “Well, it’s not working anymore.” And you ask, “What do you mean?” And they say, “Well, we're not doing the tasks you suggested we do.” And you say, “What do you mean it doesn’t work? It works fine when you do it, it doesn’t work when you don’t do it.” It’s the same thing, sometimes persistence is one of the skills of therapy and say, yeah, it probably won’t work if you don’t do it. You can’t just sit around and talk about it, you are probably going to have to do some things outside the office to master the learnings from inside the office. If you persist a little, past the doubts and the fears, often that can be an empowering thing. Of course, it’s not always empowering — at times it is like beating your head against a brick wall, and that’s not so good. I would just use my intuition. For an exercise like this, I did want you to persist. AUDIENCE: Did Milton Erickson always talk to people that weird, or did he just talk to them like that when inducing a trance? He seemed to talk to most everybody that way most of the time. Zeig says that if the mailman rang the doorbell, he tended to talk to him like that. He was doing trance and therapy most of the time ’cause he was just a wild and trancey kinda guy.

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AUDIENCE: I was sitting here wondering, what might happen if instead of talking to people in therapy as I ordinarily do, I started to talk to them the way I have learned here. Like watching their breathing and... . They'd go into trance, spontaneously without you doing anything else. AUDIENCE: Id have to figure out what I was going to do before they got there. That’s a whole different question: “Oh, oh, now they’re in trance. What am I gonna do?” I think that’s what Erickson did— that kind of conversational induction for the most part. That’s what you heard Jeff Zeig do. Sometimes Erickson would do formal inductions in which he’d say, “We are doing a trance induction,

uncross your arms and legs,” and sometimes he’d do conversational and sometimes he would mix the two. AUDIENCE: I wish I could start to talk without saying anything. Well, I think you’ve got a little ability in that direction, Fred. I’ve had a few conversations with you. (Laughter) Sometimes it’s like poetry and you just get a certain sense of the structure of it after a while. Then there’s the technique level of it, where you just practice and practice until you get it.

BIVE

The Class of Problems/Class of Solutions Model

\\/HAT I WANT TO DO IS GIVE you a simple model for how you can generate interventions once the person goes into trance. Because the question is, once you get them into trance,

what do you do? You’ve got their hands up in the air, and you say, “Great, I’ve got a response, what do I do now?” I call this idea the Class of Problems/Class of Solutions model. Pll tell you how I came up with this. I moved from Arizona to Nebraska where I live now. I started a private practice soon after I moved to Nebraska. I didn’t really know a lot of people in the area and, as those of you who ever started a private practice may know, I had a little time on my hands when I started. So I went back and reread everything that I had read about Erickson. I watched the videotapes, went back over the audiotapes, went back over my notes of my time with him and the notes I took from other people’s workshops about Erickson. Sometimes Erickson would do an intervention or tell a story, and I'd wonder, “Where did he come up with that?” The person would come in, say, for bed-wetting and, all of a sudden, he would be telling them a story about playing baseball.. And I'd think, “What does this have to do with bedwetting?” He would do hand levitation as his treatment for bedwetting. Or he would do hand levitation for impotence.

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131

CLASS OF PROBLEMS/CLASS OF SOLUTIONS MODEL Specific --------------- > Specific Intervention -------------- > Presenting Analogy Problem Anecdote Trance phenomenon Task Interpersonal move

TRANSFER TO PROBLEM CONTEXT

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INDEX

abreaction, 159 age progression, 77, 78, 79, 81, 139 age regression, 39, 41, 77, 78, 79, 81,

101 altering sensations and physiological processes, 177 amnesia:

during trance, 45 natural ability, 14 in sexual abuse case, 144-51, 155 strategy for pain control, 177 trance phenomenon, 77, 78, 81 amplification: of experience, 176 of evoked ability, 173 of responses, 93, 104, 138 analgesia: natural ability, 14 strategy for pain control, 177 trance phenomenon, 77, 78 analogical marking see interspersal analogies, 103 among related classes of problems, 131-32 one-step removed, 95, 123 see also anecdotes anecdotes, 53, 70, 73, 93, 121, 169, 171, 176 anesthesia: glove, 45, 48

natural ability, 14 strategy for pain control, 177 trance phenomenon, 77 arm levitation, see hand levitation attitudes antithetical to trance, 92

attribution: of doubt, 100 and presupposition, 172 audiotapes: Basic Induction — Milton Erickson, 30-31 Conversational Induction — Jeff Zeig, 39-41 Induction With Permission and Splitting— Milton Erickson, 62-63 Interspersal for Pain Control—Joseph Barber, 166-68 see also videotapes automatic: accomplishing goals without conscious effort, 152 coordination of breathing, 74 handwriting, 81 internal experiences, changing, 112, 184

learning, 30, 33, 174 movement, 96

pilot, 60-61, 66, 110 responses, evoking, 121, 138

responses to problem, 155

SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

202 Bandler and Grinder on changing expectations, 10

Barber, Joe: control of subject through trance, 186 critical of Ericksonian style, 109 interspersal for pain control, 166-68 Barber, T.X., non-state theorist, 20

Bateson, Gregory, 57 belief systems, using the subject’s, 5-6 Berlin, Audrey, learning style, 191-92 breathing coordination: ask for levitation on inhale, 61, 105, 124

difficulty, 65 nonaligned, 88 pattern optional suggestion, 103-4 skipping alternate breaths, 74 speak on exhale, 52, 59, 60, 61, 63, TowOS O24 GO Gk.

188 bridging, 35 brief therapy, 191 Carkhuff and Truax, 28 case notes needed, 154 catalepsy, 68, 78, 81

causal linkage, 35 class of problems/class of solutions model: evoking personal experience, 136, ilsiy/ finding similarities between complaints, 169 goal of individual construed as, 154 identifying class of problem, 138 making a subtle connection, 134 model, 130-141 task assignment, 135 closing eyes in trance: to avoid relationships, 153 comfort of therapist with, 164 optional, 45, 51, 64, 82, 103, 178 unconscious recognition of therapist’s posture, 52

confusion technique, 39, 41-43,52 conjunction, 34 conscious and unconscious mind: awareness of skill learned, 2, 107 awareness of temporary freedom from pain, 175

compared to gestalt foreground/ background, 120 in example of contingent linkage, 34-35

integrate learning at both levels, 192 hearing without listening, 31 learning to control experience, 79 linguistic, not physical distinction, 31 makes decision, 96

relative learning speed, 174 see also splitting contact lenses, removing for trance, 45 contextual cues, 24, 50

contingent suggestion/ contingent linkage, 34-35, 99, 101-2 control: belief hypnotist will control subject, 9-10, 50, 186 of depth of trance, 187 of experience, 77, 79, 115

of physiological processes by subject, 79 struggle for, 4—5 conversational trance induction: subject dictates use of, 153-54 defined, 39-41

and trust, 153-54 co-varying, see mirroring and cross mirroring create a sense of a pain-free future, 177 creative visualizations, 16 see also visualizations crossing arms and legs, 19, 45, 129 cross mirroring, see mirroring and cross mirroring cues: “And you're fantastic,” 161-63 automatic, 164

contextual, 24, 50 to end trance, 160, 162 degree of detail, 28 demonstrations: Basic Induction, 44-54 Eliciting Trance Phenomena, 82-92 Treating Pain and Somatic Problems, 179-88 Descartes and the mind/body split, 32 description, element of solutionoriented induction, 12, 26-27

INDEX

Z

description, evocation, and analogy, 131-32

descriptive matching, 26-27 dialogue in trance, 158 directing: attention and guiding associations, 43 subject’s observed behavior to induce trance, 7, 56

directive and indirect work, 15-16, 101, 106, 173

dismissing or including subject’s apprehension, ideas, and frames of reference in trance, 10

displacement of pain, 177 dissociation, 69-70, 126 from arm, 103 of awareness and activity, 72 because of abuse, 110, 117, 143, 152 of body from head, 93 communicating when starting into, 150, 152-53

contact with therapist during, 149 good at, 147 guiding, 117 to solve class of problem, 139 strategy for pain control, 177, 185 suggestion to cause, 29 distinctions: between feeling pleasure and wanting abuse, 144-45

between past, present, future, 144, 147, 183 distorting time, see time distortion distraction of attention, 177 divided attention, 47 elements of solution-oriented induction, handout, 12 empowering, 4-5, 11, 103, 123, 143, 178, 192

empty words, 39, 42 Erickson, Milton H.: approach to trance induction, 3-4, 8 belief in natural abilities, 14, 107, 109 bob and weave, 32-33, 37 confidence, 157 confusion technique, frequency of use, 41

conversational style, 128

conversational vs. formal inductions, 1:29 creativity, 97 defines trance by individual experience, 70

directive therapist, 15, 58 dissociates joke from humor, 69-70 domination of trance interaction, 158 and Dr. Ernie Rossi, 11-13

drugs stopped before hypnosis, 177 Foundation, 39 giving process up to, 16, 64 and interspersal, 36-37 liked to work indirectly, 170 optimistic, 79 pain control, 168-76 polio and its effect on style, 32-33, 54-55 state theorist, 20 stress on observation, 11-13, 29, 55 styles, earlier and later, 54-58 tag questions, 29-30 treatment for lack of sexual arousal, 136-37 uses existing skills, resources, and abilities, 143 utilization approach, 5 view of the unconscious, 108-9

workshops in his style, 2 ethical considerations, 38-39, 153, 154 evocation vs. suggestion: the naturalistic approach — element of solutionoriented induction, 12, 13-14 evoking: abilities, resources, skills, 117, 120, 176 class of problem, 131-32 experience from inside, 13, 14, 30 goals, 155 new experience, 118, 131 opposed to teaching, 121 pattern of experience, 138-39 previous experience, 41, 100, 117

re-evoking pain-free memories, 177, 182-83 re-evoking trance or trance-like experiences, 35, 58 resources, 155

in solution-oriented hypnosis, 93-95 using personal experience, 53, 94

204

SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

examples: anticipating Christmas, birthday, 40-41 of automatic movement, 96, 121-22 the ball player who wet the bed, 132-34 of before, during, after presuppositions, 21

the boy who giggled his way into trance, 9

of class of problems model, 132-39 of contextual cues, 24

of contingent linkage, 34-35, 101-2 of conversational induction, 39-41 of directive and indirect work, 15-16 Garrison Keillor of “Prairie Home Companion” novelistic detail, 74

vagueness, 28 the girl who wet her pants, 135-36 of handling fear of trance, 153 the hand that would not come back down, 69 of interspersal, 36, 37, 38 Keep Them on the Road and Keep Them Moving, 15-16 the mother’s kid who wet the bed, 134-35 of levitation, 95-103 of literalism, 69 the man who couldn’t relax, 6-8

of pain control, 166-76 the patient who was going mad, 36 the phobic therapist, 85-86, 117 of presupposition, 97 the punning salesman, 38 of treating two together, 168-76 of trance in sexual abuse therapy, 144-50

of utilization approach, 5-8, 9 of verbal and non-verbal cues, 32 the victim who felt guilty, 144-50 the woman who grew younger, 5-6 the woman with warts, 137-38

exercises: Evoking Hand and Arm Levitation,

121-29 Fishbowl] Induction and Levitation, 103-7 Induction With Permission and Splitting, 58-62 Inviting Body Dissociation, 188-89

Mutual Hypnosis, 160-65 Using Analogies and Anecdotes to Induce Trance, 70-76 exhaling, see breathing coordination expectations, changing unrealistic, 10 experience: altering, 118, 167 associating pleasant with problem, 175 creating, 158 editing and reorganizing, 117 reporting, 188 transferring, 137 using, 151 external vs. internal focus of attention, 335i formal vs. everyday trances, 14, 23, 35-36, 49 Gawain, Shakti, creative visualizations, 16 gestalt foreground/background, 120 Gilligan, Steve: fear of trance, 153

mutual hypnosis exercise, 160 glasses: negatively hallucinating, 116 removing before trance, 19, 51, 64, 82, 162, 180 glove anesthesia, 45, 48 goals, achieving subject’s own, 14 Grinder, Bandler and, on changing expectations, 10 group trance, 88 Haley, Jay: interactional explanation of hypnosis, 20

urge to volunteer, 84 hallucination: defined, 115 negative, 99, 101-2 defined, 80-81 for forgetting distraction, 95-96, 116 relieve pain of operation, 117 solve class of problem, 139 positive, 80, 81, 101

hand levitation: analogies with, 95 and disorientation, 81

INDEX and dissociation, 147 as evidence, 88-89, 140 in induction, 47-49, 85, 95-103, 104-7, 180 on inhale, 61 non-essential, 125 speculating on, 17 starting position, 91 trance phenomenon, 45, 83, 135 for unrelated problems, 130-31 volunteered, 186-87 handouts: Class of Problems/Class of Solutions Model, 131 Elements of Solution-Oriented Induction, 12

Methods for Evocation in SolutionOriented Hypnosis, 93 Strategies for Pain Control, 177 Trance Phenomena, 78 Transports: The Four Doorways into Trance, 71

Using Presupposition in Hypnosis, 18 Hilgard, Jack: hypnosis without relaxation, 83 name used in space orientation, 57 Hudson, Pat, wife, 66, 74, 190 Hudson, R. Lofton, father-in-law, 116 hyperamnesia, 81 hypnogogic state, 70 hypnopompic state, 71 hypnosis: consistent brain waves not found, 20 defined, 13, 40 obtaining written release, 154-55 testimony not legal, 154 while subject is using pain drugs, 176-77 Hypnotic Realities, 29 hypnotherapy, 121 hypnotism styles, 3-5 hypnotizable: degrees of suggestibility, 4 nearly everyone is, 3, 9 ideomotor movements, 68, 81 illusions of alternatives, 19 including the opposite, 28 time options, 148 of ways to go into trance, 16 implications, see presupposition

imply something is happening, 18 including subject’s ideas, apprehensions, in trance, 10

indirect: and direct at the same time, 15-16 suggestions, 37

individual: induction styles, 60 interventions, 154

learning styles, 2 methods of going into trance, 9-11, 45-46

responses to varying techniques, 11, 278i, tailoring anecdotes to the, 94 value received from workshop, 179 induction of trance: to amplify evoked experience, 176 building up the idea of trance, 21 development of competency in, 2 encouraging and restraining, 146 keeping them on the road and moving, 15-16 invitation, not demand, 126 mirroring and cross-mirroring, 25,

26 permissive and empowering language, 4-5

physical changes in therapist, 56, 58 using people’s symptoms, resistance, delusions, 5 internal vs. external: experiences, 79 focus of attention, 33 interspersal: element of solution-oriented induction, 12, 36-39 method for evocation in solutionoriented hypnosis, 93 for pain control, 166-68 see also puns interventions, 119, 120, 130, 131

specific to individual, 154 involuntary complaints, see voluntary vs. involuntary complaints Kubie, Lawrence, illusion of choice, 19 Lanktons, the: multiple embedded metaphor, 173 suggestions interrupting story, 172, 173

206

SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

linking: after splitting, 117-18 between two subjects, 172 by contingent suggestion, 99, 101-2 dissociation to healing, 147 element of solution-oriented induction, 12, 34-36

in induction, 56, 58, 101 resources to present and future, 150 to subject’s responses, 188 matching: in confusion technique, 42 element of solution-oriented induction, 12, 25-26 in interspersal, 38 metaphors: embedded, 172, 173 spatial, 22, 159-60 methods for evocation in solutionoriented hypnosis, handout, 93 Milan Family Therapists, 29 mirroring and cross mirroring, 25, 26,

52 see also breathing coordination mirrors, one-way, problem of influence, 57

narrowing focus of attention, 27, 51, 7596 natural: abilities of subject, 14, 178 trance induction, 14 negative stimulation, 169 nonverbal cues, 37, 50, 59-60, 66, 176 normal vs. adequate, 86 novelistic detail, 73-74, 121 observation: stressed by Erickson, 11-13, 29, 55 used to obtain cues, 35 obsessions, 115 opening eyes in trance:

for dialogue, 158 interferes with trance, 162 see also closing eyes in trance options, multiple: to bypass control and resistance, 5 for comfort in entering trance, 45, 82 element of using presupposition in hypnosis, 18, 64

invitations, 92-93

responses lead to more choices, 144 strategies for pain control, 176 subject makes choice among, 158 using personal stories, 53 “packaged words,” 27 pain and somatic problems, treating, 166-89

patterned or rhythmic behavior, 72 permission: to do whatever they are doing, 5, 9,

11, 46, 60

to enter trance any way they like, 180 to feel what they feel, 28, 59, 89, 147 to not pay attention, 10, 63

to take notes at workshop, 2 permission/validation/observation/ utilization— element of solutionoriented induction, 12

permissive: approach to trance, 3, 30 suggestions, 93, 123 vs. directive, 173

words to induce, 4 permissive and empowering words— element of solution-oriented induction, 12, 27-29 persistence needed, 97, 126 physical state altered in trance, 31, 51, 58, 90-91, 98 physiological processes controlled, 79107,115 position recommended for entering trance, 45

positive: attitude emphasized, 16, 92, 123 feelings and memories, 155, 18283 presuppositions, 17 preconceptions about hypnosis, 10 preparation for entering trance, 45 presenting behavior, 6 presenting problem, 132, 138 presume: about past, present, future happenings, 18 success, 16

trance achieved, 105

INDEX presupposition /implication/contextual cues— element of solutionoriented induction, 12, 15-25 presupposition: awareness, 24-25

“before, during, and after,” 19, 21~22 induction with, 55-56, 95, 98

options eliminated, 104, 148 tates.

using in hypnosis, 18, 55-56, 63, 64, 9372. using in levitation, 121 verbal, 19 protections for subject, 178 puns, 37, 38, 95, 103, 123, 148, 166, 181

ratification, 77-78 reinforcing responses, 56, 99-100 reinterpretation, 177 relaxing: example, refusal to relax, 6-8 in pain control, 166-67 optional, 5, 82 reorient: after trance to your body, 50, 73, 87, 107, 185 during trance, 57 in space, 81 resistance: becomes responsiveness, 97 bypassing, 5, 170 responsiveness: building up, 9, 11, 97 and observation, 13 to test for trance state, 78 rhythmic or patterned behavior, 73 “Ronald Reagan words,” 28, 88 Rossi, Dr. Ernie, 11-13, 29-31

Rossi, Dr. Sheila, 29-31

victims and dissociation, 143 victims and trance, 154 working through memories not required, 142 small steps vs. big leap, 35 smoking and hypnosis, 114 solution-oriented hypnosis: avoiding failure by using, 35 belief in natural abilities, 115 elements of, 1-43 give access to new possibilities, MN)

inside vs. outside experiences, 14, 173

oriented to existing strengths and abilities, 143 solution-oriented therapy: looks forward to possibilities, 143 rather than explanation-oriented,

120, 158

somatic problems: and class of problems/class of solutions model, 178 involuntary complaints, 115 and pain, treating, 166-89

using subject’s own expertise, 178 spacing out, 70-71 spatial metaphors for trance and mind,

22, 159-60

splitting: in confusion technique, 43 element of solution-oriented induction, 12, 31-34

fears from situations, 117 and interspersal, 36 in sexual abuse cases, 143, 147 see also dissociation state vs. non-state theorists, 20 stimulation, negative, 169 strategies for pain control, handout, 177,

self-hypnosis, 115-16 sexual abuse: assuring abuse is not continuing, 142

avoiding losing subject’s trust, 153

remembering with body before mind, 151 treating survivors of, 142-65

subjects: automatically protect themselves, 178 more varied than models, 156 teaching therapist by their responses,

16, 157, 158, 176, 189, 190

treated as normal while in trance, 159 subtext embedded in message, 36-37

208

SOLUTION-ORIENTED HYPNOSIS

success: beginner’s/expert’s mind, 156-57 identifying what constitutes, 142 of individual from workshop, 178 100% success rate claims, 157-58 partial, 125,126, 141 suggestible, nearly everyone is, 3 suggestion, 21-22

in confusion technique, 43 direct permissive, 95 empowering, 103 indirect, 171 inducing amnesia for, 172 in interspersal for negative hallucination, 95, 99 in selected stories, 53 using puns, 37, 38 support, 143 task assignment, 131, 135 therapist: can’t always find right treatment, 156-57 considers physical feedback, 163 experiences discomfort, 62 finding own style, 29 imposing help on sexual abuse survivor, 142

needs to practice developing skills, 127, needs to protect subject, 178 overcoming insecurity, 16-17 persistence, 97 put in trance by subject, 23, 163 sleeps while inducing, 66 should never doubt, 16-17, 63, 65, 12d should not impose values and beliefs, 16 Thompson, Kay, 115-16, 117 time distortion: during trance, 45, 46-47

natural ability, 14 to solve problems, 139, 147 strategy for pain control, 177 trance phenomenon, 77, 78, 79, 81 traditional approach to trance, 3-4 trance: acceptability to subjects, 154 automatic results, 152, 153

common, everyday trance-like experiences, 14, 23, 35-36 definitions, 13, 27, 70

demystifying, 19-20 difficulty coming out of, 75 ending, 160 Ericksonian vs. traditional approach, 3-4, 8 individual differences in induction, 9, 45-46 instantaneous experience, 139 integrated experiences, 86 junkies, 75, 102, 107 language and nonverbal cues, 23-24 learning to induce in two days, 1 mechanisms for deepening, 78 opposed to failure to pay attention, 23 partial, 86-87, 188 passive role for subject, 82 purpose, 108-29 rhythm of speech modified, 19-20 “riding” on induction by audience, 50-51, 162 state distinguished in language, not physiology, 20 therapist experiences, 23, 51, 16065 using existing strengths in, 147, 151 trance aspects, 70-73 trance indicators: discussed, 68-69 listed, 67 mentioned, 19-20, 31, 37, 47, 53 observed, 90-91 in quadriplegics, 140 visual distortions, 84, 162 trance phenomena, 77-107, 131 amplifying experience, 78-80 handout, 78

list, 77 mentioned, 14 reducing intensity of experience, 78, relation to classes of solution, 139 techniques to alter experience, 118 tranceports: the four doorways into trance, handout, 71 transferring, 137, 138 Truax, Carkhuff and, 28

INDEX unconscious mind: access to body wisdom, 178 aids in healing, 183 changing automatic internal experi-

Hand/ Arm Levitation (1975)— Milton Erickson, 100-3 Hypnotherapy for Sexual Abuse Aftereffects— Bill O’Hanlon, 144-50

ences, 112

Ericksonian vs. Freudian definition, 108-9 learning to trust, 2, 174 smart or dumb discussed, 109-10 see also conscious and unconscious mind using presupposition in hypnosis, handout, 18

using whatever the subject brings to therapy, 5, 6,9 utilization approach, 4-11 bridging, 35 defined, 5 element of solution-oriented induc-

Induction by Evocation— Milton Erickson, 56-58

Induction with Presupposition— Milton Erickson, 55-56

see also audiotapes visualization, 16, 101, 105, 149 voluntary vs. involuntary complaints: and changes through trance, 139 discussed, 112-15 linking, 119-20 listed, 111 waxy catatonia, 68 weight control and hypnosis, 114 Weitzenhoffer, Andre, 57 what to do once subject is in trance,

tion, 11

incorporating, 35

2-3

validate: any response of subject, 5, 9, 11, 46, 48, 59

people the way they are, 143, 147, 153

validation as induction technique, 11, 35 vagueness, 28, 67, 101, 188

verbal cues, see nonverbal cues verbal feedback, 176, 188 videotapes: Hand/Arm Levitation (1958)— Milton Erickson, 95-100

Wilk, Jim, 16, 44 wonder aloud, 18 workshop: after-workshop learning chores, 192 different from others, 1 includes nonverbal information, xi multimodal and multimedia, 2 notes, permission to take, 2 Zeig, Jeff, 54, 128 audiotape, 39-41 conversational induction, 129

uses confusion technique, 39, 42

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